


Even in the Lesser

by silklace



Series: The Cottage with a Blue Door Series [1]
Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Canon Compliant, Curtain Fic, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Kink Negotiation, Light BDSM, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Sexism, Praise Kink, Prostitution, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-12
Updated: 2018-01-12
Packaged: 2019-03-03 23:20:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 36,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13351617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silklace/pseuds/silklace
Summary: Three years later, and he still can’t say it aloud.





	1. Chapter 1

It was what it might have been to be alive, but tenderly.  
One thing. One thing. One thing:  
Tell me there is  
A meadow, afterward.

Part I

The cottage is on the outskirts of the village. Neat little garden, blue-painted front door visible from the road. Jimmy watched it appear and then get bigger with every step, dust clouds rising around his ankles, sun sharp and clean on the back of his neck, and the blue front door never wavering from his line of sight.

He looks back over his shoulder at the long, dry-baked path behind him, hedged by overgrown grass and cheerful, untidy brambles kissed by spring-time blooms. He swings his gaze back towards the door, feet moving, watching the way the heat on the road shivers and bends before him. 

His shirt is sticking to his back and he can feel his skin pinking under the white sunlight. Just a little bit more, he thinks. 

Once he’s stood in front of it, Jimmy can see that the door was recently painted – and by someone who’s never had the occasion to pick up a painter’s brush before, evidently. There are streaks and patchy bits all over the wood, and the bronze door knob has a haphazard lick of paint across it where it looks like the brush made inadvertent, regretful contact after slipping out of someone’s hand. Jimmy snorts and touches his thumbnail to it. 

He sighs, tongue behind his teeth. It’s nice, he thinks. 

In a minute, he’s going to raise his hand and touch the knocker. 

There’s a rustle of underbrush nearby and then a snort, and Jimmy turns, heart knocking against his rib cage. 

“Shit,” he breathes, startling back. Black, long lashed eyes blink back at him. Jimmy huffs out a laugh. “Hullo, girl.” 

He reaches over and brushes his knuckles along the cow’s bristly nose. She’s the color of rust, except for her ears, which are the creamy beige of milky tea. She blinks again, slower this time. 

“That’s it,” Jimmy says, moving his hand to skritch around her ears. “You’re alright.” A bee makes its drowsy way over their heads. 

Jimmy had forgotten how idyllic it was here. The sunshine, the rolling hills in the distance, everything a riot of green and the air smelling like – nothing, nothing at all. 

Jimmy takes a steadying breath and runs his thumb along the sturdy ridge of her skull. “That’s it,” he says again, moving a bit closer. She breathes out a warning sigh, but he tempers his voice, pitches it low and soothing. “You’re alright, darling,” he says, and she tilts her head into his palm. He grins, can’t stop babbling at her. “Wha’s your name, then, love?”

A breeze slides its cool fingers under the collar of his shirt. He looks down into her black, puddly eyes. “He’s not here, is he?”

He looks around at the small cottage, feeling foolish and a little sick. Still. He can wait. Jimmy knows how to wait. 

After a little while, the cow moves off to consider a patch of grass on the other side of the garden, and Jimmy drops down onto the front steps, not sure where else to go. 

Eventually, he leans back against the blue door and shuts his eyes, and when he opens them again, it’s to the feeling of someone’s fingers on his wrist, cool and undemanding. He jerks awake hard after that, pulse jackrabbiting before he remembers where he is, and why. 

It’s late, the landscape covered in a fine sheen of night’s pitch. Thomas’ face is pale and blank. 

He’s standing a few feet away. Jimmy rubs his wrist against the rough material of his trousers unconsciously.

“Did you know,” he says, licking his lips, “there’s a cow been eating your garden?”

Thomas’ expression takes a moment to readjust itself. 

“Well.” He coughs. “Good to know it’s not you who’s been coming ‘round and trampling the tulips.”

They haven’t looked away from each other. 

Jimmy touches his palm to his chest, feels his heart pick up a beat. “They’re lovely tulips. I’d never forgive myself.”

Thomas’ mouth twitches. “I’m glad you think so.” 

Jimmy still hasn’t moved off the doorstep, and he tilts his head back against the door, oddly drowsy despite the furious clatter of his heart now that he’s looking at Thomas, solid and nearly close enough to touch. 

Thomas’ eyes flick down to the long column of his exposed neck. 

“I feel much better now that we’ve got that sorted,” Jimmy says. 

Thomas considers him. “How long have you been sitting on my front steps,” he asks finally, after several long moments. 

Jimmy sniffs. “Long enough for my arse to have gone a bit numb." He touches his tongue to his lip, and then adds, before he can think better of it, “If it’s not too soon to be mentioning my arse, that is.”

“Christ.” Thomas angles his face up towards the sky, a disbelieving look on his face, as if he’s being tested. “You’re somethin’ else, Jimmy,” he says, accent roughening, eyes wide. 

“Funny.” Jimmy squints up at him, his mouth twisting a little, heart in his teeth. “You’re the only one who ever seemed to think that.”

+++

Thomas’ house is just as tidy as his room was at Downton – orderly nearing on sparse. But, still, there’s something lived in about the cottage. The kitchen table’s worn smooth and marked with water rings, and there’s a pair of tulips in a milk jug near the sink. 

Jimmy hooks one of the kitchen chairs out with his ankle and sits, knees going wide. He affects a bit of a slouch, pretends his heart isn’t rabbiting around in his rib cage. From the way Thomas glances at him as he pulls a bottle of something dark and amber colored from the cupboard, he’s not sure he’s pulled it off. 

Thomas pours each of them a generous finger of whisky and sits. He leaves the bottle out on the table. 

“Ta,” Jimmy says. 

Thomas looks at him over the rim of his glass. After a moment, he shakes his head as if to dislodge a thought. He raises his glass. “Cheers.”

They drink. The whiskey licks a clean burn of heat all the way down Jimmy’s throat. 

“Where -- where have you been?” 

“Um.”

Thomas clarifies, “I mean, after you left, where did you go?”

“Spent some time in London. Didn’t last long at Anstruther’s, if you can imagine.” He breathes out a laugh, shapes his face into something rueful. Thomas doesn’t smile.

Jimmy clears his throat. “After that, it was bits and bobs here and there, different odd jobs and the like.” His voice is light and he rubs at the back of his neck. He can’t seem to keep his hands still. “Spent some time up in Dublin, then Birmingham.”

“Goodness.”

Jimmy looks at him, then away. “Not much, no.” He bites the inside of his cheek. He can hear Thomas’ soft, even breathing. “You’ve done well for yourself,” he says, looking around. 

Thomas makes a hesitant noise, says, “As can be expected, I suppose,” but he sounds proud. His shoulders look steady and have lost some of the brittle tension since the last time Jimmy saw him. 

It’s not the only thing that’s changed. 

Jimmy finishes his drink and Thomas pours him another without being asked. “I did – I meant to write.” He hefts one shoulder in a self-conscious shrug. “Honest.”

Thomas leans back in his chair. “S’alright. I never truly expected it.”

“Oh.” 

“Jimmy -,” he starts, but Jimmy clears his throat, cuts him off. 

“No, no, I suppose I deserve that.” He knocks his knuckle against the table, a hard, flat sound in the quiet kitchen. “No less than I deserve.”

The lamp on the table throws unforgiving shadows on their faces. Jimmy looks away.

“I only ever thought you deserved love and tenderness,” Thomas says, carefully. He seems suddenly tired. “Someone to hold you, teach you, if you wanted it.” He leans forward and swipes his glass off the table, considers the roil of amber, then finishes it off in one pull. “Someone who was willing to swallow up all that anger. And the hunger, too.”

Jimmy can’t help the sound that he makes then – a low, animal noise pulled from the hollow of his chest. He presses his lips together. 

Thomas looks at him, eyes dark. “Why’re you here, Jimmy?”

 _Nowhere else to go,_ he wants to say, but that’s not quite true. The hinge of his jaw is so tight he feels a muscle spasm in his cheek. After a long moment, Thomas looks away, and Jimmy feels a flush of shame crawl along the back of his neck. Three years later, and he still can’t say it aloud. “We were friends, weren’t we?”

“Something like that.” Thomas stands. “You can kip on the sofa. S’more comfortable than my bed, anyways.” 

After he’s shown Jimmy the rest of the small house and taken an extra set of linens down, Thomas hesitates, hovering in the doorway, the top of his head nearly brushing the ceiling. 

“It’s good to see you, Jimmy.” He sounds uncertain and determined all at once. “Really good.”

Jimmy opens his mouth to speak, but – then, he can’t. He nods instead. Thomas smiles softly, “G’night, Jimmy.”

+++

He wakes up with his heart stuttering like a wild thing, sitting upright before he’s properly aware of what he’s doing. It takes him a moment to orient himself, remember where he is. The room is thick with black night and, for a moment, panic chokes at him. He brushes frantically at the wetness on his cheeks. 

Then he feels the clean linen beneath his fingers, the shape of the soft cushions next to him. He leans over and rubs his forehead against the back of the couch, breathes in the smell of wood smoke and pomade. He doesn’t expect it, but he falls asleep like that – chest bent forward, temple balanced against the couch back, mouth a soft shape of surprise and relief. 

+++

The next time Jimmy wakes, it’s to the feeling of white sunshine licking over his face. The house is quiet, the peculiar kind of silence that only happens when you’re alone in a house someone else has left only moments ago. 

He wonders if it was the sound of the door closing that woke him. 

He tries not to feel disappointed at that, pushing away the silly fantasy of having tea with Thomas at the kitchen table, cigarette smoke curling above them, elbows knocking. But they’re not at Downton, not anymore, and Jimmy’s not twenty and sick to his stomach with desire frantic under his veins. 

He makes himself a cup of tea and ambles around the house, not snooping, just curious about this Thomas – a Thomas with his own property, tongue a little less quick and cutting, temples a little greyer. 

He’s not sure if he’s the same person Jimmy remembers saying goodbye to with his heart in his throat, or even the one Jimmy’s spent the last few years conjuring in his mind, cobbled together out of desperation and a loneliness so acute it dislodged everything else. 

There’s a newspaper on the night stand in Thomas’ bedroom. Jimmy touches it with light fingertips, feels something painful and familiar unfold in his chest. 

He sits, dropping back onto Thomas’ bed, which sinks beautifully under him, plush and warm. “Liar,” he says, laughing a little and leaning back on his elbows. The sheets smell of Thomas – like cigarettes and men’s pomade and the servant’s hall at Downton. He presses his face into it before he realizes what he’s doing. 

+++

“Tuck in,” Thomas says, nodding at the plate of food he’s set in front of Jimmy, still a little warm from Downton’s kitchen. He pulls a cigarette from his pack and lights it, moving away. 

“V’you already eaten?” Jimmy asks through a mouthful, hunching in a little around his plate. He feels sleep-warmed and hollow boned from sleeping for most of the day, only having woken to drink a cup of tea or smoke a cigarette or run his fingers along the stack of books Thomas keeps on his bedside table. 

“Mmm.” Thomas releases a plume of smoke and pulls himself up to sit on the countertop. “Don’t you worry, Daisy keeps us all straining against our buttons, as ever.”

Jimmy chuckles, but it turns into a moan as he takes a bite of the meat pie. “Shit,” he says, pocketing a bit of the food in his cheek to get the words out. “Missed this.” 

“You mean the mediocre bits that the lord and lady looked down their nose at?”

Jimmy swallows, still bent over his plate, “Warm food,” he says, forking another mouthful ready. 

After a moment of silence, he looks up from his plate. Thomas is staring at him, face carefully blank. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

Jimmy shrugs. “Nothing,” he says, looking away, chewing steadily. He sniffs. “Got any of that whiskey left?”

Thomas slides off the counter and fetches the whiskey and a glass. His cigarette is hanging from his lip, and his hair is starting to loosen from its pomade. Jimmy looks down at his plate again. 

“Ta,” he says, clearing his throat. He sets his fork down, waiting, as Thomas clearly intends to serve him. 

Jimmy feels the brush of Thomas’ jacket against his shoulder as he pours a finger of whiskey out. “Alright?” Thomas says, voice low and soft and muffled by the cigarette, and Jimmy’s smart enough to hear that he’s not asking about the whiskey. 

Jimmy reaches out and places his fingers around the glass, holding tightly. The back of his neck prickles. “Cheers, Thomas,” he says, voice overly casual. Outside, Jimmy can hear the sound of the wind snicking quietly against the branches of the trees. 

Thomas doesn’t move away, and Jimmy breathes out hard through his nose, his skin feeling tight and strange and unbidden. 

After a moment, Thomas turns, circling back towards the counter where he props himself, legs long and lean in front of him. Jimmy slugs back a swallow of whiskey. 

The room is quiet. Jimmy tips the bottle and refills his glass; there’s a strange, bitter taste in his mouth. He leans back and cradles his drink in one palm on his lap, nudging his plate to the side. “Still play cards?” 

Thomas nods. “I’m sure I’ve got a pack around here, somewhere.” He pushes himself off the ledge and drops to rifle through a cupboard. 

“Grab yourself a glass while you’re at it. Drinkin’ alone’s a bit sad.”

“Never stopped you at Downton,” Thomas replies, joining him. Jimmy tips some of the whiskey into Thomas’ glass. The cards make a thwacking sound as he deals. 

“Yeah, well, I were a bit maudlin at Downton, weren’t I?” 

Thomas snorts, and Jimmy realizes he’s missed the sound of Thomas’ laugh. “Nah, not maudlin, really. More like always readyin’ for a fight.”

Sourness rises in the back of Jimmy’s throat. “Not always,” he says, mouth twisting. “Not when it mattered.”

“Ah, Jimmy.” Thomas’ hand makes an aborted attempt to reach out, but the movement stutters and he palms the whiskey instead, refilling both of their glasses. 

He clears his throat and smiles at Jimmy over the rim of his glass, eyes crinkling. “None of that.” 

“You always were too forgiving of me,” Jimmy says, voice low and wavering between regretful and fond. The whiskey churns in his stomach, making it hard to think. The back of his neck feels hot and bare. Their glasses empty too quickly.

Thomas makes a sound at that, but he doesn’t look up from his hand of cards. “Let’s just play, shall we?”

“Not sure I deserved it.” Jimmy says. He plays a card, not really paying attention, pretending his heart isn’t working its way up his throat. “Or deserve it, now.” He wishes he could shut up, but suddenly he can’t think of anything else, can’t help the words heaving out of his mouth. It’s been three years. 

He wants to say, _The first time a man paid me to get on my knees, I thought of you. I wished it were you_ , but he’s pretty sure that would be unforgiveable. 

Thomas’ voice is quiet. “I don’t think you want to do this, Jimmy.”

Jimmy’s cheeks burn. “If you knew -.” He bites back the rest of the words and swipes his glass off the table. The whiskey doesn’t taste like anything, and maybe that’s how he knows he should stop, but his pulse is skittering under his skin. The panic feels familiar, knife edged. 

“Thomas.” 

Thomas won’t look at him, but he’s given up the pretense of the game, his cards laid flat in front of him, head bowed under the weight of Jimmy’s gaze, mouth tight and unhappy. 

“Thomas, please, look at me,” Jimmy says, words slipping wet and sloppy from his mouth. “Like you used to, when it were me and you and no one else in the room.” His mouth feels loose and open, a parody of his heart. Thomas’ hand twitches convulsively on his lap. His eyes are squeezed shut. 

“Can’t,” he says, strained. 

Jimmy pitches his voice lower, but it still sounds like he’s hearing himself through wet gauze. “Why not? I want you -,” he stumbles, “I want you to look at me, like before. Please. You want me to get on my knees?” There’s a sharp intake of breath from Thomas, but Jimmy babbles on, “I would for you, I’m beggin’, you’re the only one I’d ever beg for and mean it.”

“Don’t,” Thomas chokes. There’s a skittered, screeching sound as he pushes out of his chair. 

“Why not?” Jimmy says, and he intends it to come out careless, maybe a bit cajoling, but what he hears is something desperate and wrenched. 

“S’too much,” Thomas says tightly, finally looking up from the floor. He shakes his head. “Lookin’ at you – now, like?” He nods, mouth small. “Too much.” Then Jimmy blinks and he’s gone. 

+++

Alone in the kitchen, his heart buzzing behind his teeth, Jimmy considers the three quarters empty whiskey bottle tipped on its side on the table. “In for a fuckin’ penny,” he says, and reaches for it. 

+++

“What’re you starin’ at,” Jimmy says breathlessly, straightening up over his knees and wiping the back of his mouth. The cow looks at him. It’s a look of disappointment. Jimmy spits. “Yeah, well, join the party.” He wipes at his brow. The sun’s too fucking bright.

He eyes his puke in the tulip bed. “Perfect.”

The cow snorts. “Well, I won’t tell him if you won’t,” Jimmy says hopefully. She blinks at him balefully. “Yeah, figured that was a long shot.” He puts a hand out to stroke over her soft snout. “You’re head over tit for him, aren’t you? Always hanging about.”

He licks his lips and squints, looking away. “Completely mad for him.”

The taste of bile lingers in his throat. He drops to a clean patch of grass and spits between the vee shape of his knees. 

This morning, he woke up on the couch with a blanket tucked beneath his feet, but the last he remembers was tipping the bottle against his mouth, finding it empty, and deciding that the kitchen floor looked cool and inviting and certainly offered less precipitous of a fall than the chair. 

He crooks his finger at the cow. She flicks her tail and starts to wander away. “Oi,” he says, “I thought we were friends.” She meanders further. “You’re abandoning me in my time of need,” he tells her. She doesn’t reply, because she’s a cow. 

“Stop talkin’ to livestock, Jimmy,” he mutters. The grass is rough and dry beneath his palms, but if he waits another hour or so the sun will send the oak tree’s shadow right over him, and then it’ll just be him and the grass and his puke in a corner of the garden. 

“Just me and my puke,” he sing-songs and flops down onto his back. He might still be a little drunk. 

The thing is, though, he reasons to himself, rubbing his chin against his shoulder and squinting up at the sky, is that if you spend half your time thinking of things you don’t want to think about, and the other half thinking how you shouldn’t be thinking about those things, then basically it’s all noise, all the time, with no room to follow the consequences of the impulsive, unconsidered things you do in the first place to drown the chatter out. Like taking your shirt off in front of your mate all the time, so you can watch the way his eyes go wide and buzzy; or sleeping with your former, upper-class employer in your current employer’s near-hallowed, ancestral home to prove something to someone who wasn’t interested in the proving anyways; or drinking a bottle of whiskey in said mate’s kitchen after begging him to touch you with his eyes and then vomiting in his tulip bed. 

Jimmy shields his eyes against the sun. 

Like not letting men touch you unless they pay for it, or only getting hard from the ones who get off on leaving you with bruises around your throat, or standing on a bridge over the Thames in the middle of winter wondering if maybe, maybe it would be finally, blessedly quiet underneath all that ice. 

Jimmy closes his eyes. He’s very tired. 

+++

He manages to pull himself up off the grass by the time the sun’s burned a pink stripe across his nose and then spends a wobbly couple of hours cleaning up the tulip bed and the garden - not just of the contents of his regurgitated stomach, but also the weeds and brambles which he’d come out to take care of in the first place. 

It’s good, mindless work, and even if he’s got streaks of dirt up to his elbows and patches of sweat under his arms, it’s the cleanest he’s felt in a while. 

He goes to sleep early that night and doesn’t hear Thomas come in until late, much later than usual. There’s a creaking sound on the threshold, then the quiet step of tired feet, and the even softer snick of the bedroom door closing. 

Jimmy pulls the sheet up to his chin and tries to sleep. 

+++

He wakes up with his stomach cramping from hunger, bad enough that it makes his vision darken and blink out for a moment as he tries to untangle himself from the couch. “Shit,” he says, sitting back down. His spine curves as if trying to protect the vulnerable hollow of his stomach. 

It’s not an unfamiliar feeling – but. He gnaws at his lip. He’s more likely to meet the wrong end of a fist or the inside of a barred room if he tries his usual means for acquiring money here in Downton. 

His stomach makes a wretched growling sound and he sighs. In London, the hollow cheeked boy had appealed to a certain sort of clientele and food had steadily made its way lower and lower on the list of priorities, until one day he realized he looked closer to the skinny 17-year-old who’d signed up for the war than the 19-year-old who’d left it. The war had given him lots of things – proper muscles and a shiny medal he’d chucked in the Thames and nightmares that used to leave him shuddering and clawing his way out of sleep. 

But now he knows his collarbones and hips make sharp points against his skin, saw the way Thomas’ eyes caught on them, the first night in the low light of the kitchen lamp. 

There isn’t anything in the pantry except a half-empty sack of flour and a canister of salt. He supposes Thomas must still eat most of his meals at Downton. Jimmy ate the heel of bread he’d found in the bread box yesterday, and the dinner Thomas had brought him home the night before that, and beyond that - not much else. 

Outside, the sky is threatening rain. The cow ambles over as he makes his way down the front garden path. He pauses with his hand on the gate. “Oh, so now you’re friendly, eh?” 

She snorts and twitches her ear at him. “C’mere,” he says, clucking and holding out his hand to smooth against her snout. His stomach rumbles again. “Don’t worry,” he says soothingly, “I’d never turn you into a steak and kidney pie.” 

The Downton village is entirely as Jimmy remembers it. The sense of being an outsider looking in through the cramped windows of a dollhouse shudders firmly back into place, as if it’d never left him. Dust clings to the ankles of his trousers. 

He strolls around the shops and pubs, looking purposeful and smiling charmingly. He nicks an apple from an open-air market cart as he’s passing by and eats it propped against the corner of the brick building overlooking the wide street. 

Across the way, a young woman with ruddy cheeks is arguing with the man behind the butcher’s cart, her little boy’s palm clutched in one hand and the other making a fist in her coat pocket. She’s young – looks a bit like Ivy would have a few years ago. When she turns away from the cart, shaking her head and looking upset, Jimmy sees the round swell of her pregnant belly. 

He finishes his apple, licking his sticky fingers and dropping the core. It rolls in the dirt and collects a tacky powder of dust on its wet flesh. 

He wonders what Thomas is doing. 

He strides off and makes his ways towards the back alley of the pub where they keep the rubbish bins. A boy in a white apron shoos a skinny dog off the front steps and she growls, then yelps and takes off running. 

Jimmy swallows. His mouth feels dry, puckered from the apple.

In the bin, he finds the ends of a couple of carrots and a hard, knobby potato and he eats both of those, too. The stink of garbage clogs his throat. 

The swing of the backdoor opening makes a cracking sound in the close alley. “Oi.”

Jimmy pulls himself out of the bin. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, shoving his hands into his pockets. He sniffs. “I’m leaving, I’m leaving.”

“That’s stealing, that is,” the man persists. Jimmy keeps walking, slitting his eyes over to get a look at him, but he sounds more morally affronted than like he’s looking for an apology – or payment. 

He looks like the kind of man who only responds to being called “sir.”

“Why’d you toss it then, mate,” Jimmy says, voice cavalier and taunting, spreading his arms and walking backwards. Stupid. This is what got him latrine duty during the war, and fist-shaped bruises in the streets of London and Birmingham and Dublin. 

The man makes a sudden movement, and Jimmy hustles into a proper run, booking it out of the alley and not looking back, not until he’s well on his way back up the path towards Thomas’ cottage, the blue door in his line of sight. 

+++

He scrubs his skin raw to get the smell of rubbish off of him. When that doesn’t work, he strips his trousers and shirt off in the kitchen and wrings them through with water hot enough to turn his palms and knuckles the color of blood. 

+++

Jimmy’s in the sitting room, curled up on the end of the couch in his pants and undershirt, when he hears the door open. His clothes are still out drying in the back garden. 

He looks up in time to watch something unfamiliar shift across Thomas’ face, before it shudders closed. “Oh,” he says. 

Jimmy slides his socked feet off the couch. Thomas is wearing his full livery. “Hello.” 

“You’re still here.”

Jimmy tongues the inside of his lip. “S’nice to see you too, Thomas.” He closes the book in his lap and pushes it off to the side. 

Thomas looks at him blankly. White winged moths fling themselves at the nearby window. 

“Right,” Jimmy says, pushing himself off the couch. 

“I’ll just -.” He looks around for his shoes, a metallic taste sharp in his mouth. “I dunno why -.” His shoes aren’t under the settee, which is where he thought he kicked them. Shit. 

He makes his way towards the bedroom, the back of his neck flushing red. “I’ll just -,” he says again, feeling shamefully, hatefully stupid. 

“I said goodbye to you.” 

Jimmy turns. His shoes are under Thomas’ bed. Thomas is standing in the doorway. 

“What?”

Thomas’ mouth is white and clenched small, like it’s painful to get the words out. “I said goodbye to you,” he repeats. “Not once, not just that day after the fire. Every day.” His face screws up. “Every morning, it was like, get up, get dressed, remember Jimmy’s gone. Then, just – get on with it.” He stops, shaking his head. The veins on the back of his hands are ridged and livid, his fists clenching and unclenching. “Every day it was like – it happened to me all over again. I couldn’t – I couldn’t fucking bear it, Jimmy.”

“You make it sound like – like I left on purpose or somethin’.” Jimmy tries to laugh, like it’s a joke, but mostly it makes him feel sick. He licks his lips. “I didn’t want to leave.”

“I know, I know that. But – y-you can’t – you won’t even tell me what you’re doing here,” Thomas says, not looking at Jimmy, the words coming hard and stuttery. “You – I said goodbye to you,” Thomas continues, and his mouth twists deprecatingly, “I said goodbye to the the the idea, the thought, of anyone, ever again, after you left. And now,” he makes a noise of frustration and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Now, you’re sat on me couch in your underwear when I come home.” 

Jimmy’s stomach feels knotted and achy, but his mind is blank. When he was four his mother used to tell him that she could always find her way to him by following the path of mess and chaos he left in his wake. He feels that way now. 

Thomas looks at him, waiting, and all Jimmy can think is _why did you let me go?_ , which is a stupid thought to have. 

Finally, Thomas shakes his head, turning away, one hand planted on the doorframe. “Don’t know what I’m saying. You were never mine to lose in the first place.” 

Jimmy feels panic clutch at him. “I let other men fuck me.” His heart kicks its way into his mouth. 

Thomas’ back is facing him, and Jimmy watches the way his body seems to lock into itself, spine going rigid and shoulders squaring up. 

He’s never said the words out loud. They hang in the air between them. 

“For money,” he adds. “Well, not only money. Sometimes – for food or a hot bath or a – a – a place to sleep,” he says, as if that clarifies anything. 

Thomas still hasn’t moved. “I thought you should know. I’m not – not decent, not anyone you’d want to have in the first place. Not anyone worth missing.”

Outside, Jimmy hears the quiet shuffling of the cow rustling through a patch of high grass that he suspects Thomas keeps wild and overgrown just for her. Inside, Thomas’ back remains stiff and carefully held. 

Jimmy’s eyes ache, throat clicking shut. “I thought maybe -,” he tries. _I thought maybe you still might want me, even after all this time,_ he doesn’t say. “But. I were wrong, I see that now.”

He moves to leave, feeling sick and burned through all at once, a clean edge of pain which he can’t help but shudder towards. Thomas stops him at the threshold with a hand on his hip. 

His palm is warm and cupped. Jimmy makes a soft sound in the back of his throat. 

In the low light of the oil lamp, Thomas’ face seems to gutter in and out of vision. He looks undone.

“Jimmy…,” he says. He closes his mouth and presses it softly against Jimmy’s waiting lips, one palm still pressed to the ledge of Jimmy’s hip. After a moment, his other hand comes up to slide gently along his jaw, breathtakingly slowly. It’s unmooring. Jimmy’s hands clench at his sides, unwilling or unable to do more than that. 

“Jimmy,” Thomas says again, his voice low and terribly, earnestly sweet. A raw, desperate sound claws its way out of Jimmy’s throat, his pulse kicked up and thrumming beneath his skin. 

When Thomas’ mouth slides to kiss the high point of his cheekbone, once on each side, Jimmy trembles, breath coming hard. 

“You’re shaking,” Thomas says, trailing his fingers gently along the pebbled skin of Jimmy’s flank. 

Jimmy tilts his head, looks at the wall beyond Thomas’ shoulder. “S’alright,” he says. 

Thomas makes a soft sound against his lips, sighing and brushing the hair off of Jimmy’s forehead with his other hand. “You’re lovely.”

Arousal burns low in Jimmy’s stomach. He wonders if he’s going to throw up again. 

Thomas leans in to kiss him and Jimmy turns his face away, then wonders what he’s doing and slides his mouth along the line of Thomas’ jaw. “You want my mouth?”

Thomas stills. 

Jimmy shifts, tilting back against the door frame behind him, his hip bones jutting out in sharp, inviting points. “You wanna fuck my mouth?” There’s the dry sound of Thomas stepping back a little. Jimmy closes his eyes. “No? My arse? You want me to bend over for you? That’s good, I like that,” he says and he slides his foot up the back of Thomas’ leg where it’s hooked. 

“Jimmy…I -,” Thomas sounds upset. 

“I want you to, I like it. You can fuck me right here against the wall.”

Thomas makes a shuddery breath. “Jimmy,” he says, voice pitched low and soothing. He steps closer again, and Jimmy feels his trousers rub against his naked legs. He can’t stop fucking shaking. 

Thomas runs his hands up Jimmy’s sides. “Just -,” he says carefully. He angles his head to kiss the side of Jimmy’s face. Jimmy almost wishes he wouldn’t. “Just – let me,” he sighs, thumbing at the brown buttons of Jimmy’s undershirt with painful gentleness. Jimmy frowns. 

“You’re so lovely,” Thomas says again. Something hard and flat turns over in Jimmy’s mind. 

“Don’t,” he says, pulling away. “Don’t call me that.”

Thomas looks at him. 

“Don’t,” Jimmy says again, stepping back. 

“Jimmy, I only –.” Thomas stops, straightening his shoulders. “What happened to you wasn’t –.”

Jimmy barks an unhappy laugh. “Happened to me?” He shakes his head. “You don’t know anything.”

Thomas frowns, looking unhappy. “I only meant – you – you deserve kindness.” His face wrenches. “Not some quick fuck against an alley wall.”

Jimmy laughs again, sharp and hitching. “Yeah? Is that what you think you know?” He rubs at his mouth with shaky fingers. “What do you want me to say? That I liked it – when they were rough with me? That I only got hard for the ones that left bruises?” Thomas’ face is blank. 

Jimmy takes a step back, feeling a little wild. The house is dark and silent and fragile. 

“You know,” he says conversationally, “I had one gentleman – a nice man, father of two sweet little girls, actually – who liked to fuck my throat hard enough that I couldn’t speak the next day.” He smiles. It always unnerved them, when he smiled with blood on his teeth. “I loved it.” 

The tips of Thomas’ ears turn red, but he doesn’t blink. 

Jimmy plows on. “I had another who used to slap me in the face, make me see stars. His ring would leave little spots of blood on my cheek. I’d come so hard, so fucking hard, when he’d put his hand around my throat –.”

“That’s enough,” Thomas says loudly. He breathes out through his nose, eyes crumpling unhappily. “I’d like to get some rest now, Jimmy,” he says, more quietly. 

Jimmy pauses, then turns on his heel and leaves. It’s not until he’s in the other room that he realizes he’s breathing hard like he’s been running and running and running. 

+++

Jimmy lays awake that night with his chest feeling scooped out. He lays there, wooden, until the moon is fat and low in the sky, then he drags himself from his twisted sheets and makes his feet follow the path his mind has been walking for the last several hours. He stands in the doorway to Thomas’ bedroom, throat working. 

Thomas turns over after a moment, sits up in bed. “Jimmy?” His voice sounds as soft and open as it always does, and Jimmy buries his face in the hinge of his elbow for a moment. “M’sorry,” he says, muffled. He pulls his face away. “I’m sorry, Thomas.”

Thomas is quiet. Then he says, without any kind of rancor, “I know.”

Jimmy bites his lip. It’s so dark he can barely make out the outline of Thomas’ shape, so dark it’s like they’re barely there at all, could be a dream, or something pulled from Jimmy’s shadowy imagination. “I’d let you,” he says, voice pitched low and nearly inaudible. “If you wanted. I would.” His heart is pounding so loudly Thomas must hear it. “Whatever you want.”

Thomas makes a bitten off, breathy sound. He’s quiet for a moment, then says, “Go to sleep now, Jimmy, alright?”

And when Jimmy goes back to the couch, he finds that he does, falling into sleep like crossing a threshold, quiet and without any reckoning. 

+++

In the morning, Thomas is gone, but there’s a teacup left out on the countertop next to the kettle for the first time. 

Jimmy touches it with careful fingers. 

+++

“Trying to make an escape, were you?” Jimmy looks up into the fat, black eyes of the cow from where he’s kneeling next to the kicked over fence post. “Don’t blame you,” he continues, conversationally. “Grass is always greener, eh?” He rises to his haunches and surveys the work – it’s nothing too complicated, more a matter of putting the post and rail back together from where she’s knocked it apart. 

She nuzzles at his shoulder until he pats at her haunch. “I know, love,” he says, “Need ta make a bit of a ruckus every now and again.” She grunts. “How else do ya know if anyone’s paying attention, eh?”

Still, it’s an afternoon’s work – finding the tools buried in the corner of a dilapidated shed, digging out the post from the baked ground, re-fitting it in the rails, the sun beating sharply against his neck. He’s sweaty and sore by the time he’s finished, the sun beginning to dip behind the hills in the distance. 

He drops into the grass to watch the sky untether itself into a softer shade of blue. A drop of sweat rolls down along his temple. Underneath his fingers, the dry blades of grass crumple and spring up against the movement of his palms. 

The memory of his last morning in Birmingham -- rising unsteadily in the dingy light of his rented room, pocketing the spare bits of coin left behind by last night’s punter– feels entirely distant, as if he’s watching it in black and white on a picture screen. He thought he’d never get the shocking, acidic bite of the city out of his clothes, but right now he smells like fresh, clean sweat and sunshine on grass. 

He stretches, pressing his mouth against his shoulder, and wonders if Thomas is on his way back to the cottage. 

+++

At dinner that night, Thomas says, casually, “Did you mend the fence in the back garden?”

Jimmy nods, swallowing around his food. “Properly and all, Ginger as my witness.”

“Thank you.” Thomas takes a sip of tea. “Ginger?”

“She’s…y’know.” Jimmy gestures with his fork. “The color of a ginger snap, like.”

“Well,” Thomas says, rolling a smile around like a marble in his mouth. “Nicer than what I’ve called her.” He elaborates, “Miss Piss, to match her charming personality.”

Jimmy guffaws. “How – why…is she yours?”

“Yes,” Thomas says laughing, “she’s mine, in all her ornery, tetchy sweetness.”

“Go on,” Jimmy says, leaning back in his chair and listening. 

“She jumped off the back off a lorry headed for the slaughter house,” Thomas says, shrugging. “I was in town for one reason or another, saw it happen. The driver didn’t. So, I took her back with me,” he says simply. “Seems to me she’d gone through all that trouble to survive she’d earned the right to it.”

He finishes off his tea, flashes a quick smirk at Jimmy. “Don’t be too disappointed when she kicks your fence out again in a couple of days.” 

“That so?”

Thomas stands, picking up their plates and depositing them in the sink. He leans back and reaches for a cigarette from the packet in his pocket. “Mm, she likes to know she can come and go as she pleases. Always comes back, though.”

+++

“Sorry,” Jimmy says a couple of days later, making to duck back inside when he sees Thomas. The back garden is pitch black and quiet in the late hour. The midnight moon arcs over their heads. 

Thomas gestures for Jimmy to join him. “Not bothering me,” he says around an inhale of cigarette smoke. 

Jimmy shuffles forward, conscious of the swing of his arms, the way his naked feet make swishing noises in the cool grass. He drops onto the bench and feels the press of Thomas’ pajamaed thigh against his bare one. 

“Couldn’t sleep?” 

Thomas passes him a cigarette and the lighter. He shakes his head. “Not tonight.”

The catch of the lighter sparks. “That makes a pair of us.”

Thomas slants his eyes over and looks away, cigarette hooked between two fingers. “Nightmares?” 

“Sometimes.” Jimmy shrugs. “More after the war. Now, not so often. Dunno.” He takes a drag off his cigarette. “After a couple of months at Downton, they went away.” 

Thomas ashes his cigarette and makes a thoughtful noise. “I suppose there is something incompatible with such a grand house and the trenches. Lord and Lady G having a new social enterprise every third day and Carson in a state of constant dither…makes you forget that boys died with holes in their bellies the size of dinner plates.” 

His hand – ungloved in the late hour -- makes a reflexive spasm and, without thinking, Jimmy reaches for it with a soft sound. “I remember,” he says soothingly. 

Thomas watches him, suddenly still. After a moment he says, “Wish I could forget.” He looks away. 

“When I was in Birmingham, I rented a room for a bit from a man who had terrible nightmares. From the war. Like, I’d find him screaming his head off under the bed. That bad.” Jimmy shifts on the bench, still holding Thomas’ palm in his own. “Some nights though, it weren’t so bad. He’d be up just as I was --,” Jimmy coughs,” –uh – getting in for the evening.” A bat flickers across the warm shape of the moon. “We’d have cocoa in his kitchen and he’d tell me about his travels to the Caribbean. He studied plants. I dunno. I think he’d have liked something…more or summat, but. Well.” Jimmy rubs the back of his neck. “It weren’t ever going to happen, so. Eventually he moved up north, started working in hospital, I think.”

Thomas is looking at him, expression soft. “That’s the most you’ve said about your past since you got here. Since I’ve known you, maybe.”

Jimmy snorts. “Yeah, well. It weren’t all bad, all the time.” His fingers tighten against Thomas’. “There were good bits,” he says, looking at Thomas. “You were a good bit.”

Thomas hums, and his thumb slides over the jutting point of Jimmy’s wrist bone. “And now?”

Jimmy feels warmth curl in his belly. He huffs a breath out through his nose. “I think,” he says, “I think this is my favorite bit.”

Thomas looks down at their joined hands. His hair is soft and half of the collar of his pajama shirt is tucked the wrong way. He looks up at Jimmy, the way he always looks at Jimmy, like he’s the brightest and most beautiful thing he’s ever beheld. He leans forward and presses his lips to Jimmy’s temple. “Good night, Jimmy.”

“Good night, Thomas,” Jimmy says, watching him disappear into the house. Then, more quietly, to himself, and with wonder, “See you in the morning.”

+++

“Is this – is this something I don’t understand?”

Jimmy squints down at Thomas, lobbing a handful of rotted shingle into the pile below. “Watch out,” he says cheerfully, wiping at his brow. The sun is a thin orange line on the horizon, but at midday it was a high, dazzling gem in the sky. The temperature below hasn’t recovered much. 

Thomas takes a step back, cricking his neck to look up at Jimmy, perched atop the ladder leant against the garden shed. He’s wearing gloves and trousers and boots and not much else. “Having a good day then?” 

“Brilliant.”

“Oh, grand,” Thomas says. He takes a second step back as another handful of roof debris makes a squelchy landing. “Well, I really, deeply regret interrupting whatever, um, important work is happening here, perhaps in a metaphysical sense, even, but uh – tell me again, I think I must have missed it – why you’re destroying my garden shed, again, love?”

Jimmy wrinkles his nose. “You can’t call me that when you’re mocking me.”

Thomas bites the inside of his mouth. Jimmy thinks it’s to keep from smiling. “Forgive me,” he says, “I was uh – momentarily distracted by a minor case of destruction of personal property.”

Jimmy jumps down, breathing hard. “Are you finished?” The muscles in his back and shoulders twinge, and he wipes at the sweat that’s collected along his chest and belly. 

Thomas’ eyes track the movement. Jimmy grins. 

He nods at the basket in Thomas’ hands. “Is that dinner? I’m starved.”

They eat in relative quiet, and when Jimmy looks up from his plate, the garden is covered in dusky blue light and Thomas is watching him. (Thomas is always watching him.)

Thomas clears his throat. “You don’t have to, you know --,” he wipes his fingers on a napkin and pushes it to the side. “Do stuff around the house,” he clarifies.

“I know,” Jimmy says, looking away. Thomas had removed his coat and unbuttoned the first two buttons on his white shirt. Jimmy can’t stop his eyes from flicking down to the vee of uncovered skin. 

“Do you?”

“Just wanna – just tryin’ ta make myself useful, is all,” Jimmy mutters. 

“Yeah, and that’s what I’m saying, like.” Thomas props his elbows up on his bent knees. “There’s no need for it. I’m not keeping you around to tend the garden and do the washing up.”

“I know,” Jimmy says, again. It sounds small even to his own ears and the back of his neck heats up.

“I want you here.”

“Oh.”

“I want you here, for as long as you want to be here.”

Jimmy swallows. “Alright.” He coughs. “I mean, ‘course. I knew that.” He sniffs. “Give us a cigarette.”

After he’s taken a deep drag off it, he says around an exhale, “Your garden shed was ready to cave in from all the debris on top of it.” He taps his cigarette. “You’re a bit shit at this keeping house thing, you know?”

“Ta, Jimmy.”

“Dunno what you’d do without me, to be honest. Come home and find the garden shed done in and Ginger escaped and your tulip bed overrun with voles, I’m sure.”

Thomas leans back on his elbows and angles his head to look over at Jimmy. “I’m sure,” he says softly. He drops his elbows and turns his face to the sky. “We’d fall apart without you here.”

Jimmy bites the inside of his lip. 

+++

Jimmy looks up from where he’s elbows deep in the laundry tub to find Thomas looking at him with a funny expression on his face. 

“Hullo.” Jimmy wipes his wet face on his upper arm. “Forgot it was your half day.” A trickle of water finds its way down his jaw. 

Jimmy sits back on his haunches and flicks the droplets from his fingers. His clothes sink in the murky grey water of the washing tub. He resists poking at them with a dubious finger and looks back up at Thomas. 

“Alright?”

“Do you – are you.” Thomas straightens his livery. “Do you need more clothes?”

“Um. I don’t think so?” Jimmy’s brow furrows. He’s got clothes. They’re currently in the washing tub. 

“Oh, right, good,” Thomas says, nodding distractedly. Then - “Are you sure?”

Jimmy shrugs. “This is all I’ve got,” he says, feeling the edge of shame surface. “I make do. It’s fine.”

“Is it?”

Jimmy shrugs again. He stands and stretches out his thighs, cramped from squatting over the basin. His underpants bunch and cling to his wet thighs. 

He looks up and finds Thomas watching with hunger and something else. “Oh,” Jimmy says, stupidly. 

“Right,” Thomas says, sounding as if he’s talking to himself. He picks up his hat from the kitchen table. “I’m going out for a bit.”

“Shit,” Jimmy says, to the sound of the door closing. 

When Thomas returns, Jimmy’s sitting on the couch with a book, covered up by the sheets he sleeps in. Thomas drops a paper wrapped package next to him. 

He clears his throat. “A man shouldn’t have to do the laundry in his underclothes,” he says a bit stiffly. 

Jimmy stifles a smile but says, very sincerely, “Thank you, Thomas.”

Thomas shakes his head. “It’s nothing.”

+++

When Thomas returns to the living room, he’s changed out of his livery and into his going out suit. He also looks somewhat recovered from seeing Jimmy half-naked and dripping soapy water in his kitchen at half one in the afternoon. 

“Fancy going into town?”

Jimmy meets his eyes in the small mirror propped up on the mantle. He buttons the top of his new shirt and watches Thomas come up behind him, eyes on the sturdy line of his shoulders. 

He runs his palm along the shoulder seam. “Fits you right proper,” he says softly. 

Jimmy feels his heart kick up. “Mmm,” he says. He finds himself leaning back into the warmth of Thomas’ chest. “You remembered my measurements,” he says. 

Thomas’ other hand comes up to Jimmy’s hip. “Well, I had to guess a little. You’ve lost weight since you were at Downton,” he says carefully. 

“Mmm,” Jimmy hums again, feeling a lazy curl of arousal at the steady grip of Thomas’ hands. “Years of starving on the streets does wonders for your figure.”

“Funny,” Thomas says and sets his teeth gently in reprimand against the tender spot where Jimmy’s neck meets shoulder.

Jimmy moans, broken and needy sounding. “Thomas -,” Jimmy chokes out. 

“Sorry,” Thomas says softly into the back of his neck. His voice is tight and a little high sounding. “Weren’t trying to start anything. Sorry.” He steps away. Jimmy wants to pull him back in. 

Instead he says, “S’alright,” a little slurry with aborted desire. He breathes hard through his nose and smooths a hand through his hair. 

Thomas smiles tentatively at him. “Right. We could – uh --,” he clears his throat. “We could make the two-thirty into Ripon if we leave now?”

“Great,” Jimmy says, and reaches for his hat for something to hold onto. 

+++

“Get us a booth, will you?” Jimmy looks around the crowded pub. “I’ll get drinks. Ale alright?”

Thomas nods and moves off. Jimmy knocks his knuckles along the tacky bar top, still feeling a little buzzy and wide eyed from the matinee they’d caught earlier. He can never get enough of the pictures, would go every day if he could. He even likes the soppy ones, now. 

“Can I get ya?” 

Jimmy smiles charmingly. “Two pints of mild, please,” he says, holding up two fingers. 

The barkeep eyes him. “You with someone?”

Jimmy nods and gestures behind him at Thomas sitting in a booth by the door. “Just saw a picture,” he says a little breathlessly, “at the cinema next door,” he explains. 

The man nods disinterestedly, then slides two full glasses across the bar. His eyes stray back to Thomas in the corner. “Friend?”

Jimmy hesitates. “Cousin,” he says. 

“Funny. You don’t look much alike.”

Jimmy restrains from rolling his eyes. “Me da’ had a bit of a wanderin’ eye, you might say,” he says solemnly, and leaves the bartender to make of that what he will. 

He sloshes beer down the sides of the glasses as he pushes into the booth. “Cheers,” he says happily. 

Thomas smiles at him. He glances back over his shoulder at the bar. “Everything alright?” His eyes are a little tight. 

Jimmy flicks his head dismissively. “It was nothing, really.” He pulls out a cigarette. 

“He said something then?”

“Asked if we were friends. I told him we were cousins and that was it.” Jimmy takes a sip of his beer. “Have you looked at the menu? I could eat a cow. I could eat Ginger,” he amends, then pulls a face. “That’s not true even a little bit.”

He looks up and catches Thomas watching him with his eyebrows raised. “What?”

“Nothing.” He shrugs. “You’re different now, is all. A few years ago – a comment like that? You would’ve lost your head. What am I saying? You wouldn’t even have come out with me alone for fear of someone thinking something.”

Jimmy snorts. “Yeah, well. I suppose once you’ve had all the things you worried about people thinking actually said to you -- or spit at you more like – the shine wears off a bit.”

Thomas looks sad, so Jimmy tilts his head and smiles at him. “Besides,” he says, reaching into his pocket for a cigarette, “not everything’s so different.” He slides his foot forward until it rests against Thomas’ shoe from heel to toes. “Still trailing around after you, aren’t I? Just not so bent out of shape about it, anymore, I suppose.”

Thomas takes a sip of his beer, which does nothing to hide the blush creeping up his cheeks. 

Jimmy leans back and takes a drag off his cigarette. “You keep that up and you will have us chucked out,” he says, happily. 

“Jimmy,” Thomas warns. He clears his throat. “What’d you think of the film?”

“I liked it.”

“You like every film.” Thomas taps a cigarette against the tabletop and nods for Jimmy’s lighter. “They’re not very realistic, are they? I mean, if you were going to run off somewhere, would you really choose Cornwall?”

Jimmy laughs. “I mean – that’s the point though, isn’t it? Bit of an escape for a minute, you know?” He makes a soft sound. “I was always sneaking off to the pictures in London.”

Thomas looks away and takes a drag off his cigarette, which means he wants to change the subject. 

Jimmy leans forward. “That Betty Balfour is quite fit, isn’t she?” 

Thomas shrugs. “If you like.”

“You don’t think she’s pretty?”

Thomas looks at him. “I mean, in a theoretical kind of way, yes, I do.” He looks around the bar again. “But, if anyone was going to entice me to Cornwall, it’d have been Jack.”

Jimmy smiles and then says, lightly, “Lovely eyes, that one.”

Thomas hums, quiet. Finally, he says, “No one’s asking you to choose a side here, Jimmy.”

“I know,” Jimmy says, which means he didn’t know at all. “Do you know what I’m thinkin’ about?”

“I think it’s safe to say,” Thomas says, leaning back in his seat, “that I’ve never once had a clue of what’s going on in your head.”

Jimmy scratches the back of his neck. “I was just wonderin’ if Ginger was missin’ us,” he says, which startles a laugh so abruptly out of Thomas he bangs his knee on the table. 

+++

A couple of nights later, Jimmy rolls over restlessly on the couch where he’s on his belly reading a book he found in Thomas’ bedroom. It’s by a fellow named Wilde. It’s not very interesting, and he’s hot, the warmth from the day still heavy and stale in the sitting room. 

He glances over at Thomas, who hasn’t looked at him once sit they sat down after dinner, which was nearly an hour ago. Entirely unrelated, Jimmy has the sudden urge to get up and start banging around in the quiet room. 

“Must be interesting.” 

Thomas doesn’t look away from his newspaper, but he tilts one ear upwards as if he’s listening. Jimmy rolls his eyes, which Thomas can’t see. “What you’re reading. Must be really interesting,” he says. 

“Mmm.”

“Maybe I’ll go for a walk,” he says noncommittally, crossing one leg over the other knee and settling more firmly into the couch. 

“Sure,” Thomas says. 

“Or bake a cake.”

“Sounds nice.” He licks his thumb and turns the grey newspaper page. 

Jimmy looks at the ceiling. “Or take off all my clothes and run around in the fields with Ginger.”

There’s a pause, and when Jimmy looks back, Thomas is staring at him with dark eyes. Jimmy resists smiling. “Interesting idea.”

“Thank you,” Jimmy says politely. 

“Did you need something?” 

“Oh, I’m dandy.”

“Glad to hear it,” Thomas says. He readjusts the paper on his lap and resumes reading. 

Jimmy huffs, very quietly. After a few more minutes have passed in silence, he stands up and tugs his white shirt over his head. 

Thomas puts the paper aside. “Making good on that threat? Might have given me time to warn the neighbors.”

Jimmy scowls at him. “The neighbors should be so lucky,” he says. Thomas bites the corner of his mouth, which Jimmy doesn’t at all want to press his lips against. “M’going to bed,” he says pointedly, instead. 

“By all means.” Thomas spreads his hands. Jimmy resists the urge to stamp his foot, feeling prickly all over. 

“I sleep here,” he says, and puts his hands on his belt to undo his trousers. 

Thomas stands then. “It’s late,” he says quietly. He picks up his case of cigarettes from the table next to him and shuffles off towards the bedroom. 

Jimmy’s eyes prickle, which he doesn’t understand. Thomas is going to bed, which is what Jimmy wanted. He sits on the couch, with his trousers unbuttoned and hanging off his hips. He opens his mouth to say, “Goodnight, Thomas,” but what comes out instead is, “Aren’t you going to kiss me good night?”

Thomas pauses on the threshold. Jimmy’s heart is somewhere behind his teeth. He feels like he did as a school boy, waiting for the headmaster’s punishment with fearful shame and shameful excitement. He hears the sound of Thomas’ footsteps on the floor, but he doesn’t look up until he’s standing in front of him. 

Thomas leans over and, with utter softness, takes Jimmy’s chin between thumb and forefinger. He kisses him on the forehead. “Goodnight, my dearest one,” he says. 

Jimmy lays awake that night, long into the evening, wondering why he feels like he’s done something he should apologize for. 

+++ 

The rotted plank comes away with a satisfying cracking sound, and Jimmy hefts it over his shoulder with a less-enthusiastic grunt. 

The sun is bright but hidden behind a thicket of overcast clouds, so that Jimmy’s sweating steadily and still squinting to see into the roof’s dark framework. It’s not done much to improve his mood. 

He reaches in and roots around for the supporting beam he thought he’d find. His fingers find dust and more rotted wood and the remains of a mouse nest. Perfect. 

Below him, Ginger makes a doleful sound. 

“I know exactly what I’m doing, thank you very much,” he mutters. 

He spends the rest of the afternoon ripping the roof out entirely, then hauling the debris away to the edges of the property. Ginger follows him, potentially in the hopes that Jimmy will produce another apple chunk like the one he fed her this morning. He found a small bag of them in the pantry, along with a new tin of tea, the soft brown bread Jimmy likes, and a package of molasses flavored sweets. 

He looks out at the mess pile of rubbish he’s accumulated. Ginger snuffles at his pocket. He gives her a slice of apple. The rubbish pile is. Not small, he settles on. Ginger snorts. 

“It’s fine,” Jimmy says, sucking on his teeth. He looks down at Ginger. “I’m going to get it sorted. Soon.” 

+++

“M’ a bit rank,” Jimmy says, leaning back in his chair. His undershirt is sticking to him, an oval of sweat decorating the space between his pectorals. 

Thomas flicks his eyes up and back to where he’s bent forward over his thighs, shoe in one hand and a rag in the other. The tin of polish sits near his ankles. He makes a noise of assent around the lit cigarette clinging to his bottom lip. He’s watching the rag move over his shoe with intent focus. 

“Hey now.” When Thomas doesn’t look up, Jimmy swirls his fingers across the table through the condensation left behind by his glass and flicks the droplets towards Thomas. He misses. “Here’s the bit where you disagree. That I’m giving off the stink of roses, more like.”

Thomas grunts. “You smell like you’ve been rolling around with Miss Piss for six hours on a summer day.”

Jimmy knocks his ankle against the leg of Thomas’ chair. “Ginger,” he says seriously, “is a lady, and if you’re implying that she smells of anything other than fresh air and tulips, she’s going to be very put out.” 

Thomas’ mouth twitches. He reaches for the tin and grabs a generous dab of polish with his rag.  
Finally, he says, “The wash tub’s in the cupboard, if you’re keen.”

Jimmy grins. “M’always keen, Thomas.”

By the time Jimmy’s rolled the large, galvanized tub to the middle of the kitchen and heated three inches of water for it, Thomas has put away the rag and shoes and is standing in the doorway, looking hesitant. There’s a black smudge of shoe polish under his ear, along the curve of his throat. 

Jimmy slips his shirt off of over his shoulders. 

“Oh,” Thomas says. He swallows. “You’ll be needing a cloth, I suppose.”

He ducks out and returns a moment later, a bathing sheet in one hand and a smaller cloth in the other. Jimmy looks up from where he’s sitting on the wide edge of the tub, naked. 

“Ta,” Jimmy says, reaching out with his palm open. 

Thomas’ gaze slides from the column of Jimmy’s neck and down along his chest before he looks away. He clears his throat and passes the cloths over. “Need anything else?”

Jimmy looks up at Thomas from underneath spiked lashes. Finally, he nods towards the kitchen chair. “Stay.”

Thomas breathes out through his nose. He doesn’t move and Jimmy thinks he won’t, afterall, but then he drops into the chair. After a moment, he kicks one foot up against the tub and tugs a cigarette from his pocket, lighting it and leaning back to glance at the ceiling. 

There’s the sound of water rolling against the tub, and then the slick noise of the wet cloth sluicing across skin. Jimmy sighs. Thomas’ foot twitches. 

“Ever wonder what it’d be like if I’d never left? Downton, I mean.”

Thomas sniffs, rolling the cigarette between his fingers. “Not really,” he says, finally. 

“Oh.”

“I mean,” he shifts in the chair, looking back and away, gaze catching on Jimmy’s face for a moment. “You were gone. That was it, like.” He laughs unhappily. “Not much else to it.”

Jimmy scrubs at the dust around his ankles, leaning forward over his thighs. He rubs his wet mouth against his arm. “I know that,” he says, voice muffled. “I meant, like, what-if.”

Thomas hums. “Not much interested in what could’ve been. Being in the war…,” he shifts again. “Lots of could’ve’s and should’ve’s, I reckon. Too many.”

Jimmy says nothing, still bent over his knees. Finally, he straightens forward. “I s’pose.” It’s warm in the room but the water is starting to cool, and the difference in temperatures makes him shiver. “Give us a drag, then,” he says. 

Thomas passes the cigarette over and Jimmy takes it with wet fingers, the paper going soft and crepey. He lifts his hand and takes a drag.

Thomas makes a sound like he’s been hit. 

Jimmy looks at Thomas, who in turn is looking at the ridge of pink scar tissue spanning four fingers width of his ribs, high up on his chest, that had been hidden by the hinge of his arm against his torso until then. 

“Oh.” Jimmy’s shoulders roll reflexively, a simulation of a shrug. “S’nothing,” he says. He releases the plume of smoke and hands the cigarette back over. “Here.”

“You never had that at Downton.”

“It’s nothing, Thomas.” He gestures again with the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, insistent. “Go on.”

Thomas ignores him, dropping from the chair to his knees next to the tub. “You didn’t have that at Downton,” he says again. “Fucking war nearly did us all in, but you never had a scratch on you.”

“Lovely trip down memory lane,” Jimmy says, gesturing again with the cigarette, a little desperately. “Here, Thomas,” he says, a warning note in his voice. 

Thomas takes the cigarette with an irritable flick of his head, stubbing it out in the little dish behind him. He turns back. “Not a scratch – I remember.” His lips press into a thin Iine. “I remember.” 

Thomas looks up at him, eyes wide and bright and untethered. “You were always undressing around me.” A flame of heat ignites across the back of Jimmy’s neck. They’ve never talked about this. “I know,” Thomas says. “I understood, I did.” He sucks his bottom lip into his mouth. “Sometimes it was like you couldn’t help it, you’d be so eager,” he says, voice low and unrelenting. He’s almost smiling. 

The wash cloth slips from Jimmy’s hand and makes a soft sound against the bottom of the tub. 

“All day we’d be so buttoned up and then the first minute you got, you’d be shucking off your livery,” he continues, sucking in a wet breath, “getting your kit off the minute we were back in your room or mine. I thought I’d go mad with it.” 

Jimmy’s fingers are white knuckled on the edge of the tub. “I didn’t know what to do with meself,” he says, shoulder lifting, as if the words don’t cost him anything. “I wanted you to touch me all the time.”

Thomas makes an aborted, bitten off sound. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off of you, from the first moment I saw you. You were – you were like something I knew before I recognized it. And then – I did – I knew every inch of you, even if I couldn’t touch you.”

Jimmy breathes hard through his nose at that, pulse spiking under his skin. “Fucking touch me, now, Thomas,” he gasps. 

Thomas does, crashing forward and pulling Jimmy to him by the throat, kneeling into it. Jimmy clambers out of the tub, water splashing on the floor, Thomas kissing him so hard it hurts, and Jimmy wants more of it, all of it. 

“I loved how you looked at me,” he says, fitting his hand against Thomas’ jaw. He’s half pulled into Thomas’ lap, and he can feel the coarse wool of Thomas’ trousers against his bare skin. The thought of it makes his blood skitter and roil along his bones. “Like I was your boy,” he says. 

Thomas chokes, leans up to suck a hard kiss to the underside of Jimmy’s jaw. “You kept taking your clothes off for me,” Thomas says around a hard breath, sliding his tongue along Jimmy’s Adam’s apple. “Was like – like you all but went belly up for me.” He nudges Jimmy’s head back a bit further. “You going belly up for me now?”

Jimmy moans hard, embers sparking along the back of his neck, his shoulders and spine. He wants to. 

Thomas grips him around the join of his hip and thigh, hauls him closer, and Jimmy can feel the shape of his cock through his trousers. His own prick bounces between them, wet at the tip, dragging against Thomas’ shirt. 

He rolls his hips down. It’s an obvious gesture. 

“I could,” he says, lipping along the side of Thomas’ face. “Now, like, could be that for you.” He’s not making any sense, desire hot in his belly, making everything feel urgent and narrowed. “Could give you it, let you have it.”

Thomas licks at the stubble on Jimmy’s chin, shuddery and uneven. His grip is so tight Jimmy knows it’s going to leave fingerprint marks on his skin tomorrow. Jimmy rolls his hips again, a simulation of a fuck, and Thomas makes a sound in the back of his throat. “Yeah?” he says, gasping. “Do you – do you want it?”

“Yes,” Jimmy says, the word shifting into a moan when Thomas’ hand slides around to cup the back of his neck. Something keening and sharp takes shape inside of him. “Yes,” he says again, and then, with a flush rising up his throat and crawling across his cheeks, “Take me, make me take it.”

Thomas groans, hefting Jimmy against him. Then he’s pushing Jimmy back on the floor, shoving the chair out of the way. It knocks against the cupboard and clatters half on its side, but Jimmy isn’t looking, he’s arching his back and angling his neck to press harder against the weight of Thomas’ palm on the side of his side of his head, cradling and possessive. 

His breath is high and pitchy, and he looks up at Thomas, bleary eyed. What he sees makes him turn his face into Thomas’ palm, open mouthed. “Make me feel it,” he slurs hotly. “Been wantin’ it for so long.”

Thomas flips him over onto his belly, and Jimmy’s vision darkens with heat and undiscovered arousal. He can’t stop rolling his hips, moving back for it, humiliation flecking the tips of his ears and fingers with heat. “Thomas…”

Thomas lays one steadying hand on his flank, warm from the heel of his palm to the tight clutch of his fingertips. Jimmy’s knees slide against the wood floor, wet from his bath. He hears the sound of braces being pulled down, trousers shoved down over thighs, and then the unmistakable, strangely erotic noise of Thomas spitting.

A globule of saliva lands on his hole, followed by the wet head of Thomas’ cock. He chokes, dropping his forehead on his forearm and trembling. His prick is a hard shape against his belly, smearing wetness. “Yes,” he says, mouth red and loose, “yes,” only ever saying yes to this, to Thomas, ever again. 

Thomas’ breath comes in these punched out little gasps as he shifts, kneeing forward and driving into Jimmy, pushing his cock inside. He sounds hunted, trembling just as much as Jimmy. “You’re --,” Thomas bites out, swearing and swallowing back the rest of the words.

 _I am,_ Jimmy wants to say, inexplicably, but he doesn’t, the muscles in his shoulders and back straining to hold still as he bears down on the exquisite breach of Thomas’ cock. He feels the wet slide of Thomas pushing more saliva against the space where Thomas’ cock is rooted inside of him. “Want you,” he mumbles blearily, “want you so much.”

Every nerve is lit up. He feels his desire for Thomas from the roof of his mouth to the arches of his feet. 

Thomas drops his forehead against Jimmy’s back, just under the wing of his shoulder blade. His elbows are braced on either side of Jimmy, his thighs pressed against the backs of Jimmy’s thighs. “You --,” he breathes out, voice tight and low. 

“Sod me, Thomas,” Jimmy moans, and Thomas groans, fucking his pelvis forwards, smoothing his hands down the sides of Jimmy’s torso to clutch at his hips, to haul him in further, until there’s no space between them, just the tight fuck of Thomas’ hips, barely moving. 

“Jimmy,” he breathes, and he reaches forward to wrap his forearm against Jimmy’s chest, which makes Jimmy’s vision white out with desire so fiercely he feels wetness come to his eyes. Thomas fucks forward again and Jimmy whines in the back of his throat, teeth aching with want. 

Everything feels so tightly wound, and Thomas is a tense, trembling figure against his back.

Jimmy realizes then that everyone lied. Surrender has nothing to do with waving white flags and going quietly. It’s like kneeling at the foot of your captor and being grateful for the light touch of the sharp edge of his blade on the back of your neck. 

He grips Thomas’ forearm and angles his head back for a kiss, which Thomas gives to him without hesitation. “Fuck,” Jimmy says, pulling back and licking his lips. Thomas watches the swipe of his tongue, and when he sees Jimmy noticing he kisses him again, rolling his hips forward until Jimmy moans into it, mouth going slack and loose. 

When they part, Thomas plants kisses along the side of Jimmy’s face, his jaw, down towards the back of his neck. It makes Jimmy’s skin ripple with heat. 

“I wanted you to find me,” Jimmy admits then, watching his knuckles skid across the floor, his voice low and breathy. “I used to imagine it, you walking the streets of London, looking for me without realizing it. You would find me there and you would know, just by seeing me, you’d know that I never stopped missing you, not just since leaving Downton but before that, even.” He pauses and bites his lip. Thomas holds him. “I think I’ve missed you all my life,” Jimmy says, quietly. 

Thomas’ breath catches. “Oh, Jimmy,” he says, a little pained, and then he’s pressing his face against the back of Jimmy’s neck again, rubbing his stubble there, and something inside of Jimmy splits in two. He slaps his palm down on the scuffed wooden floor, scrabbling backwards, trying to cant his hips open and arch his back, and that’s when Thomas pushes him down so that his chest is against the floor, his waist pulled up and held in Thomas’ grip. 

“Fuck,” he says, and it becomes a litany as Thomas’ thrusts turn frenetic, his cock hitting the spot inside of Jimmy’s arse that makes his cock drippy and wet and Jimmy is going to come without a hand on his cock, just Thomas’ prick fucking in and out of him and his hands holding him around his waist and belly. 

Jimmy looks down between his thighs and sees the way his cock is leaking onto the floor beneath him. He moans, stuttery and wild, “I’m going to,” he says, “Fuck, Thomas, I’m going to,” and Thomas groans as the first wave of Jimmy’s orgasm rolls through him, blinding, obliterating, his cock jumping between his legs. He drops his fist around his shaft and pulls himself through the aftershocks of pleasure, still moaning, Thomas’ prick a full and hard weight inside of him. 

Without thinking, Jimmy brings his slick fingers up to his mouth and sucks on them. Behind him, he hears Thomas make a choked off noise and then go still and silent as he comes. 

It’s quiet in the kitchen, after the tumble of noise from their bodies. Jimmy thinks, _now’s the part where I check the money before they leave,_ and then feels a bit sick with himself. Of himself. 

The buzzy feeling of his orgasm begins to dissipate. Thomas hasn’t said a word. The ache of the floor is making itself known in his knees, the hard points of his shoulders. After a moment, he feels Thomas’ cock pull out of him, and is shocked, always shocked, by the bereft, gaping feeling he’s left with. 

He tries to think of something to say, but Thomas is lying down beside him, pulling Jimmy to him again. His hand cups Jimmy’s face. He looks wrecked, his mouth red and wet.

“When I say that you’re lovely,” he says, voice shaking, “it’s not your looks I’m talking about. I mean --,” he kisses the corner of Jimmy’s mouth as if to steady himself, then continues, “it means that you are the only one that I love, that you are my most beloved, always and only ever you.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,” Thomas says, still a little breathless, cradling Jimmy’s face in both hands now. “I wanted to find you, Jimmy, I did - so that I could look at you again, so that even if I couldn’t say it, even if you couldn’t say it, you wouldn’t have to go on missing me.”

“I know,” Jimmy says, ignoring the wetness in his eyes, holding Thomas tightly around the wrists, letting him lick and kiss all over his face. “I know,” he says again, because he didn’t, he thought he’d let strangers make bruises of his body until one day it killed him, thought he’d die on those streets, that Thomas might hear of it, years later, when Jimmy’s body had rotted in some pine box, and he’d be stricken by it, a little sick, maybe, but he wouldn’t know, would never know that Jimmy had wanted to survive, that he only could ever smile through the blood on his teeth, because someday, in some unnameable, unknowable future, he’d held on to the part of himself that was always and only ever meant to be here in Thomas’ arms telling him he’s waited for him all his life. 

+++

Jimmy wakes in the slow, predawn hour of the morning when the light is still soft and blue and tenderly held. He wakes without knowing why, or how, or from where he was stirred, but moves from sleep to waking like stepping quietly over a threshold. 

Thomas is seated on the edge of the bed, dressed in his livery. When their eyes meet, Jimmy thinks Thomas might say something, but he doesn’t. His eyes are soft and round. The room is full of quiet. 

Jimmy shifts his head on the pillow underneath him, taps his pinky against the edge of the pillowcase. They’re still looking at each other. 

After a moment, Jimmy slides his fist across the coverlet towards Thomas, bumps it against his knee. Thomas takes it, and their fingers unfold around each other, palm meeting palm. 

+++

The sky threatens rain all day. In the morning, Jimmy pulls the weeds that have sprouted in the overgrown vegetable patch, then abandons it by noon and makes himself a cup of tea, watching the clouds brooding on the horizon, then drinking another cup. He ventures out later to return to it, but finds himself walking the perimeter of the garden, picking up sticks and storing them in a bin in the shed for kindling. When he realizes what he’s doing he stops and makes his third cup of tea, then forces himself back out to brush Ginger’s coat and feed her molasses sugar cubes and tell her she’s the loveliest girl he’s ever known. 

It’s not until Thomas walks in that night and Jimmy feels his pulse pick up in answer that he understands what he’s doing. 

Thomas hesitates for barely a second, just enough to blink at the tableau of Jimmy in his kitchen offering full tea service, then nods, hanging his hat on the peg by the door. “Alright.”

He sits. Jimmy pours out tea for both of them. “There you are.” 

“Thanks very much.” He raises the cup to his lips then stops. “Are you – going to sit?”

“Oh, right. Yes,” Jimmy says, feeling more like an idiot with every passing second. They drink their tea together in silence. He has the sudden desire to push the service off the table and slide into Thomas’ lap as it crashes to the floor, so instead he blurts out, “Good day at work?”

Thomas’ eyebrows attempt to acquaint themselves with his hairline. “Um,” he bites his lip, “One of the hall boys spilled ash on the Persian rug in the library.” Jimmy nods politely. Thomas tilts his head, considering. “Lord Grantham scuffed his favorite riding boots.”

“My,” Jimmy says, lips pressed thin around a smile. 

“Well,” Thomas says, “you know the only reason I stayed at Downton was for the unending series of thrills it provides…” Thomas says, trailing off when he can’t hold back his smirk any longer. 

“Sorry,” Jimmy says, laughing now, feeling silly. “Dunno why I’m being odd.”

“S’okay,” Thomas says. “God, it’s nice to hear you laugh.” He leans back in his chair, looking away, pretending it’s easy to say. “I missed it.”

Longing washes over Jimmy in waves. He stands and goes to the kitchen window, pulls the curtains closed. When he turns, Thomas is standing there, waiting for him, so Jimmy goes to him. 

(Later, in bed, Thomas does tell him about Downton – how he became butler two years ago, when Mrs. Hughes finally convinced Carson to retire to the seaside; how Georgie’s a terror to everyone but Thomas; how Daisy left and then came back, a little surer of herself; how things seem to change and stay the same all at once.

“Some things,” Thomas amends, touching Jimmy’s mouth with his thumb.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraph is from Lucie Brock-Broido's A Meadow. 
> 
> The line about there not being much goodness in Birmingham is borrowed from Peaky Blinders.
> 
> Comments and con-crit welcome and adored! <3


	2. Chapter 2

By the first of August  
the invisible beetles began  
to snore and the grass was  
as tough as hemp and was  
no color—no more than  
the sand was a color and  
we had worn our bare feet  
bare since the twentieth  
of June and there were times  
we forgot to wind up your  
alarm clock and some nights  
we took our gin warm and neat  
from old jelly glasses while  
the sun blew out of sight  
like a red picture hat and  
one day I tied my hair back  
with a ribbon and you said  
that I looked almost like  
a puritan lady and what  
I remember best is that  
the door to your room was  
the door to mine.

Part II

It takes Jimmy another week to finish the garden shed.

“Not too shabby, eh, love?” Jimmy drops down from the ladder on the third step, looking up at the finished roof, shading his eyes from the overhanging sun. Ginger snuffles in the grass nearby, ignoring him. He carries on, “I reckon I’m not too bad at this sort of thing.” He looks back at her over his shoulder then again at the roof. In a few years, it’ll be covered in grey-green moss and leaves from the beech trees that grow nearby, but right now the wood and thatching is strong and honey-colored in the afternoon light. 

When Thomas gets home, he brings him out to the garden to show him. The temperature has cooled off and the clouds are low and full above them. “Go on,” Jimmy says, pushing him up the ladder with a firm hand. 

Thomas looks at him with exasperation. “I wouldn’t even know what I were looking for!” 

Jimmy pushes him again, “Oh, just go on.” 

“Now, you’re just trying for a grope,” he says, eyes wicked as he looks back over his shoulder. 

Jimmy snorts. “Give it a look,” he says softly. “S’your shed,” he says, looking away, squinting in the evening light. He sniffs. “Want it to be up to snuff and all that.” 

There’s quiet. When Jimmy looks up, Thomas is watching him, but he looks away before either of them can say anything. It smells like rain and wood in the garden. 

Jimmy considers the grass, which is green and lush and soft from the summer sun. The beds around the shed are bare – could do with some flowers, or some herbs for the kitchen. Or maybe some of the tall grass Ginger likes. His mother kept a bit of potted herb in their kitchen when he was wee, but she always complained that there wasn’t enough sunlight. Maybe he could find a book that would tell him what goes where in a garden with half-sun, half-shade. 

Maybe he’s getting ahead of himself. 

He looks up when he hears Thomas clambering down the ladder. “Seems right to me,” he says, mouth quirking a little. He looks like he wants to say more but he doesn’t. Jimmy wishes he would.

It’s started to rain, light drops that catch on Jimmy’s lashes and the tip of his nose. Thomas rubs his gloved hand for a moment then stops himself. He’s looking around as the rain starts to come down a bit harder, then he says, “I suppose this’ll be the test,” and pulls Jimmy into the shed. 

It’s musty and stale-smelling inside. Old, dried leaves have collected in the four corners of the small room. 

Jimmy trips over a crack in the slate floor as Thomas pulls him along, and Thomas clutches him closer. “Careful,” he says, voice soft in Jimmy’s ear. There isn’t any light; it makes the hairs on the back of Jimmy’s neck stand up. 

He lets himself be backed against the wall, Thomas crowding close and real. He suddenly wants him so much it makes his teeth itch. 

“Hullo,” he says, once Thomas has got him settled with the shed’s wall at his back, his big palm gentling on his hip. The rain sounds like little feet pattering back and forth along the roof. 

Jimmy shifts, restless, eyes following the outline of Thomas’ shape in the dark, waiting for him to materialize. He reaches out and hooks his fingers in Thomas’ braces, pulls him in closer. Thomas sighs and kisses him on the mouth. 

“Yes,” Jimmy says into it, feeling Thomas’ mouth curve into a smile under his own. “Yes,” he says again, a little more urgently. 

Thomas slides his lips along the curve of Jimmy’s jaw. “Been wanting you all day,” he says, voice muffled. He pulls back and runs his fingers along Jimmy’s scalp, just above his ear, checking for permission. In answer, Jimmy tilts his head and bares his throat. 

“Ah,” Thomas says, low and happy, “there’s my boy.” 

His fingers trace a path from the soft skin behind Jimmy’s ear down to his neck; the ribbon of pleasure it leaves in its wake wraps directly around Jimmy’s cock. He pulls Thomas in by the waist to rub against his hip, kissing him open mouthed and eager. 

“I wanna get off with you,” Jimmy says, mumbling the words around the taste of desire in his mouth, “wanna feel your cock in me.” Because he wants to, he presses the heel of his palm between Thomas’ legs.

Thomas takes his wrist and flattens his hand back against the wall near his head. “Just wait.” He nips at Jimmy’s bottom lip, presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Can you do that?” He tightens his grip around Jimmy’s wrist briefly, one gentle squeeze. It’s enough. 

Jimmy shudders, throwing his head back, body made of want. Thomas leans in and runs his mouth along Jimmy’s throat. “I’m gonna take care of you,” he mumbles, accent thick and roughened, “Let me,” he says, “let me have it, yeah?” 

“Anything,” Jimmy says, which earns him another tightening of Thomas’ fingers around his wrist. “You can do anything you want to me.”

“Try again.” 

Jimmy swallows, off kilter and painfully hard. He bites his bottom lip and looks up through his lashes at Thomas. “I want your cock.” He hooks his ankle around Thomas’ calf. “I want you to fuck me, Thomas,” he says, reaching for Thomas’ trousers with his free hand. “I can make it so good for you.”

Thomas catches him by the wrist. His smile is sharp, but it’s with terrible, unending gentleness that he leans in and kisses Jimmy on the mouth. “No games,” he says, softly, bending Jimmy’s arm above his head so that he can take both of his wrists in one firm grip. “Not with me.”

“Fuck.”

“Later, maybe.” Thomas tips his head back, so he can suck a kiss there. “If you really want it.”

“I do, I want it, I always want it,” Jimmy says, and because he can’t decide if he wants to be good or bad for Thomas and it’s turning him inside out, he babbles, “I’m a slut for it, I wanna come sitting on your cock, please, Thomas.”

That does get Thomas’ hips jerking forward, but he just smiles again, sharp and knowing. He palms the front of Jimmy’s trousers. “I think you just want to come, full stop.” He unzips Jimmy’s trousers and pushes them down to his thighs, which feels like being bared and held fast all at once. 

“I think,” Thomas continues, breath a little stuttery, “you need to come, desperately.” He grips Jimmy through the material of his pants so they can both see the shape of his erection. “Look at you,” Thomas says, tugging his thumb along the head, a move that makes Jimmy’s back skitter and arch with pleasure. “Look at that gorgeous cock,” Thomas says, and this time he does roll his hips forward deliberately, so Jimmy can feel his hardness. He thumbs the head again. “Already wet for it.” 

Jimmy tries to shift the angle of his hips, so he can press his bottom back against Thomas’ erection, but Thomas holds him still and pulls his head around for a sloppy, open-mouthed kiss, rubbing his thumb in agonizing pleasure, dragging the wet material over the sensitive head of his cock until his thighs are shaking. “Let me help,” Thomas says, moaning around the slick noise of their kiss, “Let me make you come, darling.”

Jimmy presses his face to Thomas’ throat, shaky, breathless. His pulse is spiky and his skin fever hot. “Suck me off,” he says, “please.” He shudders, body taut from his wrists to his ankles. “Suck my cock,” he begs.

“Good boy,” Thomas says, and then he’s dropping to his knees in front of Jimmy. “Go on,” he mutters, looking up, “show me.” He kisses Jimmy once on each bare thigh. “Take your clothes off for me, love.”

Jimmy whines, feeling like his heart is on backwards. He’s panting now, but he manages to hook his thumbs along the waist band of his underclothes and shove them down, fingers shaky, until Thomas helps, tugging his trousers and pants and shoes off, lifting each ankle one at a time. 

Jimmy’s cock is hard and flat against his belly. Without being told, he pulls his shirt up so they can both see, Jimmy’s eyes flicking between his own body and Thomas’ hungry face. He can’t help the way his hips are thrusting forward in tiny movements, eager and wanting. He whines again when Thomas reaches forward and cups his bollocks in one big palm. “Lovely,” Thomas says.

Together they look at him, hips sharp, thighs trembling, cock curved and flushed with arousal. Thomas licks his lips, and Jimmy’s cock jumps in response. “Thomas,” he says, half warning, half begging. 

“Just wait, love,” Thomas says, smiling up at him. “Gonna take care of you.” He grips Jimmy around the thigh and hitches his knee over his shoulder, the movement cocking Jimmy’s hips open and splayed. He rubs the untouched crease of smooth skin between thigh and groin, still looking at Jimmy. “Alright?”

Jimmy huffs a laugh, lip caught between his teeth. He feels like he’s back at Downton, blushing whenever Thomas caught him out in his hunger. “Want to come,” he says, fingers scrabbling against the grooves of the wall behind him. He takes a breath. “Want to come for you,” he clarifies, ducking his head, feeling like he’s telling a secret. 

Thomas presses his lips to Jimmy’s knee. “I know,” he says, reassuring and steady, and he wraps his fingers around Jimmy’s cock. It feels nothing like relief, only makes the urgent stutter of Jimmy’s pulse louder and hotter. 

He bucks up into Thomas’ fist, driving towards pleasure. Thomas says, “That’s it,” kissing his knee again. Then he drags his stubble along Jimmy’s inner thigh, and Jimmy’s back arches, his fist flying up to his mouth. 

“Fuck,” he says, high and breathy. “Fuck, do it again, Thomas.” 

He does, over and over, until Jimmy’s thigh is red and beginning to welt up and there are tears in his eyes, his cock dripping and smearing wetly against his belly.

“Please,” he says, gulping messily, as Thomas drags the flat of his palm across Jimmy’s pink head. When Thomas finally leans forward and sucks his cock into his mouth, Jimmy cries out, a raw, needy sound he’s never made before. 

Thomas sucks cock carefully, as if he’d been instructed on how to do it and Jimmy, distantly, wonders what made the lesson so memorable. Lips stretched wide and tight, neatly covering his teeth, he bobs over Jimmy’s lap with a distinctly reliable rhythm, like a metronome or a clock. It’s tidy, almost perfunctory. 

It shouldn’t be making Jimmy’s belly pool with liquid hot arousal. 

And yet, Jimmy’s got his teeth set around the knuckles of two fingers to keep from crying out. His moans are muffled, stifled, and his other hand is still bunched in a vice-like grip around the material of his shirt, keeping it out of the way, so that if Thomas wants he can look his fill at the hard, blood-red picture of his cock. His body is a narrative in tension, and Thomas is methodically, systematically unraveling it. 

“Thomas,” he pants, when he’s close, “Gonna – gonna,” he tries to say, but Thomas only tightens the o of his mouth and sucks more quickly and efficiently. When he feels the muscles in Jimmy’s stomach start to jump, he moans, low and euphoric, and that more than anything else is what has Jimmy shoving his fist into his mouth as he comes hard and brutal. 

“Oh, god,” he chants, “Oh, god.”

Thomas sucks him through it until Jimmy’s squirming with sensitivity. Then he turns his head and presses his mouth softly to the tender skin of Jimmy’s thigh, careful of his stubble, light brushes of his lips that are meant to soothe. Jimmy’s waiting for his pulse to stop roaring in his ears, rolling the back of his head on the shed wall. 

He feels shot through, like little pieces of himself have been punched out, put back together new and different and beloved. 

He looks around as Thomas shifts, gripping Jimmy’s knee and bringing it gently back down to the floor. Thomas stands, keeping one hand on Jimmy’s hip, holding him loosely. He leans in. “Alright?” He kisses the side of Jimmy’s face. “You did beautifully,” he says, and Jimmy makes a sound and pulls his chin down to kiss him on the mouth. 

After a moment, he drops his forehead to Thomas’ collarbone. In the quiet, he hears the sound of the rain again. “S’pose the roof has done its job.”

Thomas hums. “Knew it would.” 

When he shifts as if to pull away, Jimmy tightens his grip on his shoulders. “Just,” he mumbles, cheeks reddening, “just a bit longer.” Thomas stays. 

+++

“Cows are herd animals, aren’t they,” Jimmy says, a couple of days later. He’s up to his elbows in dirt, squatting on the edge of the freshly tilled garden, looking out at the rows of seedling holes he’s spent the afternoon preparing after Thomas came home the other evening with an armful of packets, blushing to the tips of his ears, saying there’d been a surplus in the delivery at Downton. Jimmy had taken this to mean he’d gone to the trouble of going into town to pick up the packets himself, after Jimmy had spent a fond afternoon rifling through them last time they’d been in the shop together. 

“Can’t have you disparaging the state of our vegetable patch, anymore,” Thomas had blustered, and Jimmy had bitten back a smile, hearing the word “our” ringing over and over in his mind even as he’d rolled his eyes and said, “It’s either tulips or dirt out there, Thomas; calling it a vegetable patch is just takin’ liberties.”

“Like, they usually go in packs, right,” he continues, now. There’s earth under his fingernails and in the creases of his knuckles and he’s sure he’s got a streak of it on his forehead, too, ‘cause every time he looks over his shoulder at Thomas, the man purses his lips around a private smile. 

“Sure,” Thomas says from the bench, where he’s smoking a cigarette and pretending to be useful by sorting the seed packets. The sun is just about to go over the horizon for the evening, and Thomas is still wearing his livery, though he’s loosened the bow tie around his throat. 

There’s silence for a bit as Jimmy ponders this, then he stands and walks over to Thomas, who offers him a drag off his cigarette. Jimmy holds up his hands to gesture that he’ll get dirt on it, so Thomas leans up further and holds it out for Jimmy to take with his mouth, instead. He does, holding eye contact with Thomas the whole time, enjoying the blush that rises up over his features. 

After he’s exhaled, he props his hip on the back of the bench. “Ginger hasn’t got a herd.”

“Ah,” Thomas says, standing. 

“She’s probably lonely.”

“Seems perfectly alright to me.”

“Sure, she’s alright, but is she happy, Thomas?”

“Didn’t you want to get these planted tonight? Isn’t that why we’re out here postponing our tea in the first place, darling?”

Jimmy rolls his eyes, heading back over to the garden with the box of seeds in his hands. “I’m just sayin’,” he continues, as if he hadn’t been interrupted. He kneels down and rips open the first packet of seeds. Tomatoes. It’s a little late for them, he’d read about it in the book he’d found in the shed, but it’ll have to do. “She hasn’t got anyone.”

“She’s got us!”

“Anyone of her kind, like,” Jimmy presses. Thomas is balancing on his haunches next to him, one hand propped on the box to keep him steady. 

Jimmy frowns. “You should take your glove off, you’re going to get it dirty.” 

Thomas makes an indecipherable sound. “Alright,” he says, and removes the glove, stuffing it in one of his pockets. They both pretend not to look at his hand – but for different reasons. 

Jimmy makes his way down the first line, dropping a couple of seeds into each pocket of earth, Thomas nearby with a new packet of seeds when he runs out. They work quietly for several minutes until Jimmy says, “S’probably why she keeps wanderin’ off, Thomas. I think she goes over to the Stearman farm – over on the other side of the apple trees, you know? Lookin’ for company.” 

Thomas’ mouth twitches. “What would you like us to do about it, Jimmy?”

“Dunno, just sayin’ like.” He finishes the row and starts a new one. Cucumbers and spinach, he decides. “We should keep our eyes out an’ all.”

Thomas snorts. “For another crotchety, run-away cow escapin’ from the slaughterhouse? I think that might be a one in a million chance, love. Our Ginger’s unique.”

His voice hits such a high note of bemusement Jimmy chuckles. “Christ, keep your head on.” He laughs again, ducking his chin to hide his smile, which is bordering on blatantly affectionate. “Your voice goes any higher, we’ll have to find a pretty dress for you to wear.” 

“Oi,” Thomas says, pushing his knee in indignation – only, it catches Jimmy off guard enough that he loses his balance, but not before taking Thomas down with him. He lands in the dirt on his back, laughing, hands fisted in Thomas’ jacket. 

Thomas is smiling. 

“Don’t worry,” Jimmy says, huffing a laugh. He looks out over his shoulder, but the garden is lit with the blue light of evening and there’s no one for miles. He wraps his arms around Thomas’ shoulders, pulls him closer. “I think I’d like you in a dress even. Or out of one.” He leans up and licks at Thomas’ jaw, pulling an appreciative shiver from him. “Or in one, but rucked up around your waist…” 

Thomas bites his lip. “God,” he says, and then he kisses Jimmy on the mouth; it’s a little sloppy, a little urgent, tastes like smoke and dirt. 

The minutes stretch hazy and beautiful, but finally Jimmy pulls back. “Go on,” he says, dropping a final, more chaste kiss on Thomas’ lips. “I’ll finish up out here.”

Thirty minutes later, having watered his new seedlings and put the tools back in the shed, he leans over and pulls his shoes off on the threshold of the kitchen door. Thomas is by the stove, down to his braces, pouring tea into two chipped cups. There’s bread, hard cheese, butter, and a plate of roast chicken on the table. 

Jimmy sniffs appreciatively. “Smells divine,” he says, happily, running his hands under the cold tap. 

“You can thank Daisy,” Thomas says. He brings the tea over to the table and they sit, but then Thomas stands up again. “Sorry, forgot,” he says and ducks out of the room. When he comes back, he’s fitting his fingers back into the glove. 

“Leave it,” Jimmy says, voice casual. He shrugs at Thomas’ look. “S’ just us, innit? So…leave it off.”

“It’s – grotesque,” Thomas says, face carefully blank. 

“I – I don’t think so,” Jimmy replies, looking down at his plate. He wants to stand and go to Thomas, kiss the wooden look off his face, slide his mouth along the scarred center of his hand - but the part of his soul that is Thomas’ twin knows he shouldn’t, that what Thomas decides to do in this moment should be – his own choice.

Thomas hesitates. “S’just us, like,” Jimmy says again, and Thomas nods once and sits, leaving the glove on the counter.

+++

Later that night, Jimmy finds Thomas sitting on the edge of the bed, looking down. His back is bare, as if he’d stopped in the middle of changing his clothes. When Jimmy comes closer, he sees Thomas is staring at his palm. 

Jimmy knees up onto the bed, unsure, but Thomas hasn’t moved, hasn’t said anything, so Jimmy reaches out and touches his shoulder, slotting in close behind him. After another moment, he presses his lips to the back of Thomas’ neck. He can see, out of the corner of his eye, as Thomas’ lashes flutter closed. 

Jimmy breathes in through his nose, arousal and something else burning through him like a slow fire. “Wanna make you feel good,” he says quietly, into Thomas’ skin. Thomas reaches back and cups his head and Jimmy moans outright. “Want me to suck you off?” He rolls his mouth, lips half parted, up the column of Thomas’ throat. “Or do you wanna fuck me?”

Thomas turns, then, and kisses Jimmy, unhurried and slow. He moves them back until they’re lying on their sides on the bed, bodies arced towards each other. After a moment, he reaches over and grabs something off the bedside table, which he presses into Jimmy’s palm. Jimmy looks down at the small jar of petrol jelly in his hands, then back up at Thomas, who has rolled over on to his belly. 

Jimmy fucks him carefully, with slow, deep thrusts of his hips, until they’re both aching with it. When Thomas comes, he makes a noise in the back of his throat, pulls Jimmy closer against him with his scarred palm curled around Jimmy’s hip. 

Later, when they’re both drowsy and on their way towards sleep, Thomas says, “We could go to Paris. Or Berlin. For a trip like. You could see – have you ever been?”

Jimmy shakes his head, quiet, watching the way the moonlight is painting silver streaks across Thomas’ nose and chin. 

“Well,” Thomas says, kissing his temple. “It’s different there. There’s…lots of people – like us. Dancehalls and theaters and restaurants and pubs – all with people like us.”

“Like us?”

Thomas shifts, then says, “Men with men, women with women, men and women with men and women. All kinds.” He pauses. “Our kind.”

Jimmy thinks of it, tries to imagine a public place with women dancing cheek to cheek, with men holding hands. He can’t – not really. “Never really thought I had a kind,” he says, honestly. 

“Me neither,” Thomas says. “Or at least – I used to think that. Now, I’m not so certain.”

“A trip – the two of us like? – though, that’d be – nice.” He rolls over onto his other side, pulls Thomas’ arm around him again so they’re back to front. “I’d like that.”

“Alright,” Thomas says, “It’s a promise, then.”

+++

“Wossat?” Jimmy asks a few days later, around a mouthful of apple. He leans over Thomas’ shoulder to get a better look. The kitchen is quiet, smelling like candle wax and the dinner they finished about an hour ago. 

Thomas hums, swiveling the tiny silver tool in the joint of his thumb and forefinger as if to flex the tight muscle of his hand. He leans closer to inspect the tiny wooden clock, tinkering with the latch and plucking the glass face out of its beveled fitting. “Clock,” he says, without looking up. 

Jimmy rolls his eyes, resists the urge to toss his apple core at Thomas’ head. He drops into the adjacent chair and puts his feet up on the table.

Thomas looks up immediately. Jimmy smiles and takes a bite of his apple. He’s been out in the garden all day; a bit of dry grass shivers off of the sole of his boot and onto the table. 

“Jimmy.”

“Darling.”

Thomas’ mouth quirks despite himself and, to hide it, he leans over and flicks the side of Jimmy’s shoe. “Off.”

Jimmy huffs but drops his legs to the floor as requested. He knows he’s being bratty – he just can’t help it. After another moment of silence, Thomas having returned to tinkering with the clock, he tosses his apple core towards the wooden box he’s started keeping near the door for composting. It falls short and rolls across the floor. 

Thomas puts his tool down. “Okay.” He straightens up in his seat. “Did you want something, love?” 

He says it with such sincerity it makes something unhinge and fall away in Jimmy’s chest. He pulls a face and slides to the floor, knees over to Thomas so he can rest his head on his thigh. “Sorry,” he says. Thomas drops his hand on the back of Jimmy’s neck and it makes him even sorrier. “Just curious, is all,” he mutters, voice muffled because he’s got his mouth half planted against the smooth weave of Thomas’ trousers. 

Thomas tips his chin up. “That’s nothing to be sorry for,” he says quietly. He taps his forefinger against Jimmy’s lip, and Jimmy opens his mouth for it like a reflex. Thomas’ cheeks redden. He coughs and shifts in his seat, which makes Jimmy want to press his face down between Thomas’ legs, but Thomas pulls his hand away and says, “Come sit next to me.”

Jimmy does. “It belonged to Anna’s sister,” Thomas says, nodding at the little wooden clock and pulling a cigarette out of his pocket. “Stopped working a couple of months ago. Anna asked me to look at it for her, see if it might be fixed.” He lights up and takes a drag, exhaling and explaining, “Told her ‘course I would,” he pauses to exhale. “For a fee.”

“Smart,” Jimmy says. “And is it? Something you can fix, I mean.”

Thomas ashes his cigarette into the dish they keep on the table. “If I can’t, nobody else can.”

“Humble, as ever,” Jimmy snorts, folding his arms. He plucks the cigarette from between Thomas’ lips and takes a drag. “Your da taught you, right? About clocks?”

“That,” he says, looking at Jimmy and then away, “and how to take a slap around the head.” He snorts, cocking his head to the side in a gesture of deliberate casualness. “Never knew it’d serve me so well.”

Jimmy tugs the candle closer towards him, cigarette dangling from his mouth. He runs his fingertip through the flame, too fast to feel it. “Gotta turn your face with it, eh?” He ashes the cigarette, not looking at Thomas. “A girl in Dublin taught me that.”

Thomas’ hand flexes on his knee; Jimmy sees it out of the corner of his eye. He has the urge to get down on the floor again and push his face into the bowl-shaped curve of Thomas’ palm, to feel Thomas’ skin on his skin and not think of anything else. 

Instead, he stands up and stretches; knows without seeing it that Thomas’ eyes are caught on the flat, white plane of his belly that is revealed with the movement. “Let’s have a drink, shall we?”

“Alright.”

“So, do the others – at Downton, I mean – know about me?” He ducks into the cupboard and pulls out an unlabeled bottle of red wine, half-filled. He holds it up to the light. “Still nicking from the cellars, are you?” 

“That was a gift,” Thomas corrects, a little primly. “And, yes, it’s – uh,” he coughs and pulls out another cigarette. “It’s come up.”

“Oh.”

“Was it a secret?”

“No,” Jimmy says automatically. He sets two glasses on the table and fills them, then says, “Came up like how? Like, here’s the paper, polish the silver, don’t forget Lady G’s handkerchief, and, oh, by the by, Jimmy’s back from whoring around the country.”

“Mmm, not quite like that.” Thomas taps the ash off his cigarette with a flick of his finger. 

Jimmy laughs, a brittle sound, feeling like he’s running headlong into a hole they’ve been walking around. “I suppose former-footman-turned-rent-boy’s not exactly a story for polite conversation.” 

He pulls the chair around with his ankle and drops into it, elbows crossed over the back. He tugs his face into something like casual curiosity. “How do you explain it, then? I mean, what? Remember that lad who tried to have me sacked? Well, funny that, turns out he’s a bit of a bender himself, ta, and now he’s kipping in me house, making friends with the local livestock - that is, when he’s not washing me dishes and sucking me cock like a good little housewife.”

“Jimmy.”

“Sorry.” He lifts one shoulder and stubs his cigarette out, wishing he had another one. He is sorry, but he’s glad he said it first, before anyone else could. “It’s true, innit, though?”

“I don’t think you’ve touched the washing up once since you’ve got here, love.”

Jimmy snorts, dropping his forehead down on his arms. “Thomas.” 

Thomas reaches over and hauls Jimmy closer by the edge of his chair, the gesture making a raucous screeching sound. He palms the side of Jimmy’s head, and all of the itchy labor of Jimmy’s heart quiets. 

“I know you’ve got this fantasy that I’m keeping you ‘round for your housekeeping services, but -,” Thomas bites his lip and widens his eyes, “the truth is –,” he pauses meaningfully, “the place has never been more of a tip.” He puts his hand over his heart. “God’s honest truth,” he says smiling sharply now, “never been messier.” 

Jimmy swats at him, but he doesn’t pull away from the gentle caress of Thomas’ fingers along his temple. “You’re a tosser.”

“And you’re not a tidy boy,” Thomas shoots back. He pats Jimmy’s jaw with just enough bite in it that desire spikes down Jimmy’s spine, brutal and whipcord sharp. He turns his open mouth to kiss the tips of Thomas’ fingers, languid and wet. 

“Are you saying I make a mess?” Arousal burns the back of his neck and tips of his ears with heat. He spreads his legs wider. Thomas glances down at the movement, swallowing when he sees Jimmy’s prick starting to fatten up in his trousers. 

“Filthy,” he says, voice low. He tugs on the hair at the back of Jimmy’s neck. “You want to show me?”

+++

The first time Jimmy sees the rows of curled, green sproutlings pushing through the dark earth, he nearly drops his teacup in the sink. He’s standing in the kitchen, nursing a second cup of tea to go along with his pounding headache. They’d stayed up late the night before, playing cards, smoking endlessly, drinking white rum from jam jars until Thomas had picked him up by the thighs and laid him back against the table, where he’d fucked him, sloppy and tender and mouth sucking purple bruises up to the surface of his skin. 

It’s late morning, mist rising over the trees as the summer sun burns off the dampness that’s collected over night. The grass is still cool beneath Jimmy’s bare feet as he heads towards the garden.

He kneels in the dirt, fingers reaching out to brush the tomato sprout that’s inching it ways up towards the sunlight. “Would you look at that,” he says, feeling something joyful and bright shift inside of him. He’s never made anything come alive with his hands before. 

He hears movement behind him and looks over his shoulder to see Ginger ambling over. “Hallo, girl,” he calls, happily. “Have you seen this? Have you seen what we’ve got? Your da’s a proper farmer, Ginger, did you know? A right – woah, girl, no, no, bad Ginger, bad girl!”

Ginger moos at him mournfully, tugging Jimmy along with her, his heels making dents in the soft earth. “Bad girl,” he says again, a little helplessly, “those aren’t for eating. Not yet, anyway.” He steps in front of her, careful of her hooves. “Shoo, off with ye’.”

It takes several more moments, but finally she ambles off with a baleful look. “Well,” Jimmy says, looking down at his – Thomas’ -- mud spattered pajamas. “Fuck.”

+++

“Fecking bleeding shitting arse tit of a fuck.”

“I’ll give you points for creativity, but I’m afraid your grammar is out the window.”

Jimmy makes an inarticulate noise of rage, which draws a wince from Thomas where he’s leaning against the threshold from the kitchen to the sitting room. Jimmy misses it, instead is focused on the torn shirt in his lap that he’s attempting to repair, but which so far he’s only managed to spot with blood pricked from the tips of his fingers. He sucks his fingers into his mouth, feeling murderous. Over sewing. 

Thomas pushes off the wall with his shoulder, crossing to where Jimmy’s sat on the couch. He drops to his knees in front of him, which only serves to make Jimmy both enraged and aroused at the same time. 

“Sweetheart,” Thomas says. He takes Jimmy’s fingers from his mouth, kisses them one at a time. 

“Oh,” Jimmy says. 

Thomas pushes the sewing off his lap, runs his palms along Jimmy’s thighs. “Can I help you relax?” He’s wearing his undershirt at the late hour; Jimmy can see the shape of his chest underneath the thin cotton. 

“If you like,” he says generously, spreading his thighs. 

Thomas hums with pleasure, doesn’t play around getting his pants and trousers pulled down, taking his cock out and jacking it a few times in his hand, eyes flicking between Jimmy’s flushed prick and his flushed cheeks. 

Jimmy had thought the swell of desire, the urgent, thready pull for Thomas to touch him, to look at him, to express his want of him would lessen over time. 

He watches Thomas bend his mouth over his lap, kissing the crown of his cock, and knows it hasn’t. 

“Fuck,” he says, hips jumping forward into the heat of Thomas’ mouth. “Yes,” he says, licking his lips, “need this, need it so bad.”

“I know,” Thomas mumbles, sliding his mouth down the shaft, kissing the base with his eyes closed and his lips parted. “Let me – lemme give it to you.” He slides his mouth lower, envelopes each of Jimmy’s bollocks into the heat and wet of it. 

“Shit,” Jimmy grunts, biting his lip. Then Thomas works his mouth back up around the head and Jimmy doesn’t say much more after that. 

It doesn’t take him long to feel the rush of his orgasm gathering in his belly. Thomas has learned quickly what he likes, how he goes from hard to panting and wet when Thomas dips the tip of his tongue in his slit; how sucking him down to the root and then pulling off in one quick motion makes his cock jump against his belly. 

When Thomas starts to touch himself between his legs, Jimmy groans, lifting his heel and pressing it into Thomas’ back, some instinct he has around Thomas to spread his legs. 

Afterwards, Thomas kisses his knee. “Alright, love?” He does Jimmy’s trousers up. 

“Bit hard to be put out when you’ve just come like a bullet, innit?” He pulls Thomas up against him, until they’re arranged on the couch. Thomas is a little stiff, still not used to this – Jimmy gets its, he does, but he wonders who taught Thomas that a cuddle wasn’t something he could expect, never mind ask for, even after he’s had his face between another person’s legs. 

He tucks his head against Thomas’ chest, remembers the first time he’d met Thomas, how he’d looked at Jimmy like he was starving.

Thomas isn’t wearing his glove; Jimmy takes his hand and folds his own around it. 

“Want to tell me what’s bothering you?”

Jimmy opens his mouth to tell him about the mud from this morning; the slap dash fence he’d spent the day erecting around the vegetable patch, barely strong enough to keep the wind out never mind a single-minded cow; how he’d torn his only good shirt halfway through and how he’d never learned to sew, not even in the war, because his Da had told him it wasn’t something boys did, it was women’s work, but now his fingers are sore and his shirt’s spotted with pinpricks of blood. 

What comes out instead is, “I wonder if Lord Grantham’d let me back into service.”

Thomas’ hand stills where he’s been brushing Jimmy’s hair back off his forehead. Jimmy makes a soft sound until Thomas resumes. 

“Jimmy,” he says carefully, “I don’t think he’s forgotten -.”

“I know, I know,” Jimmy says, sitting up. He scrubs his hands over his face. “S’stupid. Fuck.” He pulls his hands away, but doesn’t look at Thomas. “I haven’t got a ha’penny to me name,” he says, voice pitched low. 

Thomas is quiet. “I can ask,” he offers, finally.

Jimmy groans, dropping his head back on the couch. “Yer jus’ sayin’ that, now like.”

“I would. For you. You know I would, Jimmy.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, relenting. 

“You hated being in service.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy repeats, more quietly this time. Then, “I hated renting, too, but funny thing, a person actually needs money to get by.”

“Careful, or you’ll have the communists knockin’ at our door with talk like that.”

“Ah, well,” Jimmy grunts, “maybe the commies are on to something.”

“Look,” Thomas says, “I’ve got some savings. With that and my wages and all – we’ll be alright. Whatever you want to do, Jimmy – it’s up to you, love. If you want to work in a shop in town or you want to go back into service or you want to grow tomatoes and sell them in the square – it’s your decision.”

“You make it sound like - ,” Jimmy says, looking anywhere but Thomas’ earnest face, “like I can – just. Do anything. It’s not that simple.” 

“Could be.”

Jimmy is silent. Thomas shifts a little then says, in an undertone, “Right about when I was your age, I thought I might have a chance to leave service. I was so close to it, too, I could about taste it on the tip of me tongue. Then it all crumbled to dust, as these things have a way of doing,” he sighs, leaning forward so that, if Jimmy were to lean back, they might be embracing. 

Jimmy doesn’t. He doesn’t want the thought of money and touching Thomas anywhere close to each other. 

“I’m glad it didn’t happen,” Thomas says softly, tucking a kiss underneath Jimmy’s ear, “because then I might never have known you. But if I could have found my way to you,” he says, leaning away a little, “without the years of being a fixture in someone else’s house, I would have taken it. I might have killed for it.”

Jimmy looks at him, his proud shoulders, his uncertain mouth. Thomas sniffs, “A useful fixture, certainly, but a fixture none the less. Like a door knob.”

Jimmy sighs. After a moment, he pulls himself off the couch. “I need a smoke.” 

“In the kitchen,” Thomas says quietly, watching him.

Jimmy grabs the pack off the table and makes his way towards the back door, feeling fretful and stupid. He lights his cigarette in the dim light from the kitchen window, then wanders further out, feeling the grass under his feet. In the distance, he can see Ginger tucked down for the night like an overgrown cat. The wildflowers he’d spent the other day foraging for and replanting around the shed look soft and moonlit in the evening, white petals curled lazily over fuzzy green briars. 

He thinks suddenly, I would do anything to keep this.

Behind him, he hears the door creak open. He realizes he’d been waiting for Thomas to follow him. He curses himself for being a soppy git. He takes a deep drag on his cigarette; the smoke is bitter in the back of his throat. 

When Thomas touches his elbow, Jimmy’s body moves like a reflex; he’s stepped away before he even realizes what he’s done. 

“Oh.”

Jimmy catches the shock of hurt that flashes across Thomas’ face. He makes a disbelieving sound, stepping away, muttering under his breath. Jimmy feels something hot and ugly swoop in his belly. “What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, go on, Thomas, something you want to say to me?”

Thomas stops, his back going stiff and brutally straight. “It’s nothing.”

“Oh, say it, might as well, eh? Nothing I haven’t heard before.”

Thomas turns around; his face looks bone white and furious in the moonlight. “I said,” he starts, words clipped and tight. He steps closer, and Jimmy know it’s only so he doesn’t have to shout, but that doesn’t stop the flinch that jolts through him at the abrupt movement. 

Thomas stills, completely, like a rabbit’s heart suddenly gone snow-quiet. 

“Sorry,” Jimmy says, turning away. His breath is coming quicker than he’d like. “Sorry, sorry,” he mumbles, taking a step further into the black night, away from Thomas.

“Jimmy.” 

His fingers are trembling. He shakes them out with a sharp flick of his wrist. 

“Jimmy,” Thomas says again. Jimmy can see the painful shape of his mouth without looking.   
I’d never hurt you,” Thomas says quickly, “I’d never, ever lay a hand on you.”

“I know that.”

There’s a terrible silence, then Thomas says, quietly, “Do you?”

Jimmy turns quickly at that. “You’ve been nothing but good to me.” 

It’s true; Jimmy knows it, knows Thomas treats him better than he’s even been treated before. Sometimes, in the mornings, Jimmy wakes to the feeling of Thomas sliding his palm gently along the sleep-warm skin of his lower back, as if touching Jimmy is the first, instinctual thought that flickers into being in the sleep-warm, hazy corners of Thomas’ waking mind. 

Now, Jimmy watches as Thomas’ face crumples. “Is that what you think?”

“I don’t –.”

“What happens, then,” Thomas says, “if I’m not happy with you? Would it be alright to hit ya? Is that it?” Thomas swipes his hand across his mouth, and Jimmy sees that his fingers are shaking, too. “I come home in a black mood one day, and that means you’re not a person, so no matter if I knock you around a bit, eh?”

“I never,” Jimmy swallows, “I never said that.”

“No,” Thomas says, voice pitched low, “you wouldn’t.” He takes a breath and then a step closer, and again, until Jimmy _can_ see the fine shape of his mouth, pale and wretched. “You didn’t have to.”

Jimmy wonders who else Thomas is speaking to, whose ghosts are hovering with them tonight in their moonlit garden. 

“I see you, Jimmy – I always have, haven’t I?” 

Thomas makes an aborted gesture with his hand, as if reaching out to cup Jimmy’s face. He pulls back at the last minute and Jimmy feels his gut twist. “Thomas.”

“I love you because I love you, Jimmy. It’s simple as that. Not because of how you make me feel, or what you do for me. People – people aren’t things, they’re not ornaments, or or or fixtures. And so – I love you, and because I love you I could – would -- never hurt you.”

Jimmy had counted on two things during his time at Downton: first, that Carson’s capacity to appear at his elbow the second he took a break from his chores was unfailing and unflinching, to the point that Jimmy had seriously wondered if he’d resorted to dark magic or, at least, had recruited the hall boys against him as spies; and second, that Thomas wanted him. 

Every time Thomas’ eyes tracked Jimmy like he was the only person in the room, every time Thomas’ fingers had jumped with the reflexive, instinctive desire to touch Jimmy – Jimmy had known, I am wanted. He’d said the words to himself so many times – I am wanted – that he can taste them now, bitter and full of longing, in the back of his throat. 

To see Thomas make that movement now, a gesture that belongs to the long halls of Downton, here in their back garden, where Jimmy has planted tomatoes and daisies, where Thomas has brought him tea as the moon rose above the oak tree, where Jimmy has kissed the ten pads of Thomas’ fingers just for the sheer pleasure of knowing what each one tastes like on his tongue - 

A sound surfaces out of his throat and he steps into the waiting cup of Thomas’ palm. 

He kisses Thomas’ wrist. Thomas nudges his face back a little so that he can lean in, run his nose along the edge of Jimmy’s jaw. “We belong to no one but ourselves, and so we belong to no one but each other,” he breathes, and before he can say anything else, Jimmy kisses him, if only to tell him back, _You are wanted._

+++

The next morning, Jimmy rolls over onto his back to feel the sunshine on his face. “Tomatoes,” he says, without opening his eyes. He can hear Thomas pulling on his livery. “Thomas,” he says, after not getting a response. “Tomatoes.”

“I. I’m actually not sure if you’re saying my name or – inexplicably – shouting out names of produce, but truthfully I’d appreciate you clarifying, as if it’s the latter case I’m going to need some time to come to terms with the reality that even when the subject is fruits and vegetables, the sound of your morning voice goes straight to my cock.” He pauses and then says a little wistfully, “I had hoped there were limits.”

Jimmy cracks one eye open. “You think my morning voice is sexy?” He absolutely does not deepen his voice. 

“Astonishingly,” Thomas says, looking anywhere but Jimmy. He sounds a little pained. 

Jimmy cocks his head to the side. “Hm. Good to know.” He shuts his eyes again, utterly ignoring the small painfully happy bubble in his chest. “I’m going to grow tomatoes. And sell them in the square. If they’ll have me.”

When Jimmy opens his eyes, Thomas is smiling at him. He’s holding one trouser sock in his hand, forgotten. “Alright,” he says softly. 

Well, Jimmy thinks, that’s that. 

“Good,” he says. “Now, c’mere.” He doesn’t bother pretending he isn’t leaning into the rumbling, gravelly tenor of his sleep-roughened voice. 

“You’ll make me late,” Thomas says, sounding wholly unconcerned. He drops the sock onto the floor. 

“Mmm, yes, but I’m going to be whispering about produce in your ears as I’m doing it, and I think we’ve already established what that does to you, my good sir.”

“Oh, please don’t call me ‘sir,’” Thomas begs a little helplessly, kneeing up onto the bed and into Jimmy’s arms. “There are some things I don’t need to know about myself.”

Jimmy laughs aloud, and then he’s laughing against the shape of Thomas’ smiling mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraph is Anne Sexton's I Remember. 
> 
> Comments and con-crit welcome and adored! <3


	3. Chapter 3

And I was happy, you hear yourself saying, 

because it felt as if I’d been allowed  
to choose my last day on earth,  
and this was the one I chose.

Part III

“Daisy’s engaged,” Thomas says, offhandedly, squinting at a point over Jimmy’s shoulder and into the weak morning sun. Jimmy blows on his fingers, stiff from fussing with the baskets full of produce from their garden that are hitched to the front and back of his bike. He nods, only half listening. 

Summer had bled away, passing in a roiling haze of sun-kissed moments - like the afternoon Jimmy had discovered wild blackberries in the fields around the cottage. Thomas had come home on his half day, and they’d spent the long, warm hours sprawled on the grass, chasing the taste of summer from each other’s mouths. Another time, it had been too hot to sleep, so they’d rolled the bathing tub outside in the middle of the night and taken turns cupping cool water against each other’s necks and backs, until Jimmy felt desire so sharply along his skin that Thomas had fucked him right there, against the door of the cottage, quietly and with his mouth pressed to the back of Jimmy’s neck.

There were other moments, too, but what Jimmy will remember best is the way time smudged together into a single memory, as if summer was one long, hot day, the edges of it endless and sprawling and reappearing, vivid and fragrant. 

“To be married,” Thomas continues. He fiddles with the strap on Jimmy’s bicycle pack. 

“You’re going to be late, you know,” Jimmy says in response, but he reaches over and pulls a piece of fluff from Thomas’ lapel. 

“I’m alright,” Thomas says, smiling now. His eyes flick over to the rising sun again, though. He is going to be late. 

“You’re dawdling.” A breeze shakes a few orange-edged leaves down around them. “You can tell me all about Daisy’s mad love affair tonight.”

“Not dawdling.” Thomas’ voice is soft. “Did you take the sandwiches from the ice box?”

“I did.”

“They’ve got shrimp paste on, like you like.”

“I’ll be extremely fortified. Ready for any nasty customers.”

Thomas gives him a dark look, but he says, “I’ve no doubt. I hear the vegetable market in Ripon is positively brimming with menace. Though, to be fair, I wouldn’t want to get in the way of a determined housewife trying to get her shopping done with six snotty kids on her elbow.”

“They’re extremely resourceful,” Jimmy agrees. “Last month, I saw a woman brandishing a cucumber in a manner not unlike a knight unsheathing his sword.”

“Good god.”

“Here lies Jimmy, impaled on a carrot, may he rest in peace.”

“And beside him, Thomas, buried under the collective weight of thirty-seven,” Thomas says, enunciating carefully, “excruciatingly detailed and astonishingly condescending missives from Carson, whose retirement I had thought might conjure the distance required for me to look back and fondly miss him. Alas. Why are you smiling?”

“No reason,” Jimmy says, clearing his throat and looking away. Buried beside each other. 

Not even death do us part. 

“You’re an odd duck.” Thomas looks around, then quickly leans in and kisses Jimmy on the forehead. “I’ll see you tonight.” He nods his head at the baskets. “Off with you. Bring us back hordes of money.”

Jimmy laughs, “Fairly confident we just about broke even last month, Thomas.”

“Bring us back mediocre amounts of money.”

Jimmy squints at him, hiking his leg over and straddling the bike. “You’ll still love me, then?”

“Don’t make me say soppy things so early in the day, darling, you know I’ve a reputation to uphold.”

“Oh, go on.” 

Thomas smiles and looks away. “I’ll still love you, Jimmy.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. 

+++

“Interesting.”

“Isn’t she perfect?” Jimmy strokes his hand along the silky feathers. The chicken snaps at him. 

“That’s - certainly one word to describe her,” Thomas says. He takes a sip from the tea Jimmy prepares for him most evenings after returning from Downton, a ritual turned habit. “Others come to mind.”

“Don’t listen to him, darling,” Jimmy coos at her. “He won’t be complaining when we’re eating soft-boiled eggs in the morning, will he?” The chicken makes another lunge for Jimmy’s fingers.

“I think she’s considering patricide, dearest.” Thomas pauses, considering. “Never mind, she’ll fit right in here then. Welcome to the family, Eggy.”

Jimmy hides a pleased smile in his shoulder. “Who says you get to name her?” Then, with a hint of anxiety, “I’m not sure we’re even supposed to be naming the animals. Doesn’t seem like the done thing around here.”

“First of all,” Thomas says, around a sip of his tea, “I’m not sure we’re lining up to be the model citizens of Downton, what with the degenerate homosexuality and living in sin bit, so stuff whoever says we shouldn’t name them and,” he continues, pulling Jimmy to his feet, “you forfeited all naming rights when you barreled in and rechristened my beloved Miss Piss.”

“You know she’s never forgiven you for that.”

Thomas tuts, “I know that she has only developed a moderate preference for you because you’re constantly feeding her sweets.”

Jimmy lets himself be folded into Thomas’ embrace. “She likes them. Plus, now, she’s got competition,” he says, gesturing towards Eggy, who is pecking at the ground with a kind of peevish energy. “We’ve got to make sure she doesn’t feel forgotten.” 

Thomas is kissing his jaw, which is making it harder to hold onto words. The ache from standing in the cold air all day, awash in the brassy noise and smells of the market, suddenly makes itself known in his bones. Thomas’ arms around him feel like a balm. 

“Let’s go inside,” Thomas says, with a hint of what he might like to do when they get there. “It’s cold.” He slides his mouth along the arch of Jimmy’s throat. “Lemme warm you up.”

“Thomas.”

“Yes, darling?”

Jimmy swallows around the panic. “What if she freezes out here? Or runs away? I haven’t had time to finish the coop, I wasn’t expecting her so quickly and all.” He frowns, biting his lip. “I can’t just stuff her in the shed.”

“Oh,” Thomas says, looking bewildered, “Can’t you?”

Which is how Eggy spends her first night in the kitchen, and Jimmy learns the art of reconciliatory blow jobs. 

+++

In the morning, he finishes the coop under Ginger’s baleful watch. 

“Eggy’s not so bad,” Jimmy says, over his shoulder, as he grabs the bucket and mop from the shed. Thomas had taken one look at the kitchen that morning, turned back around, and told Jimmy on his way out, “I’m going to pretend I’ve never seen that.” Jimmy intends to help Thomas along with that fantasy. 

“Honest,” he says, as Eggy screams her indignation at having been moved, bodily, from the kitchen to the coop. “You’ll be used to each other in no time,” he says loudly. 

Ginger ignores him for the rest of the day, but later that night, when Thomas comes home, she ambles up for chin scratches and apple slices. 

“You know,” Jimmy says, paring another slice of apple for Thomas to give to Ginger, “that shed is infested with mice. And the garden does have voles.”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say!”

“No cats.”

Jimmy sniffs. “That’s not what I was going to say, at all.” It is exactly what he was going to say. 

Thomas says nothing. Jimmy feeds Ginger the next apple slice. She moos happily and switches her attention to Jimmy. 

“Cats make me sneeze.”

“It’s not like she’d be sleeping in the bed with us, Thomas.”

“Dear god,” Thomas says, looking behind Jimmy. “You’ve got one in your pocket now, haven’t you?”

“All I’m sayin’,” Jimmy says, with a tone of extreme patience, “is, it wouldn’t be so bad if we were to find a cat that needed a place to stay.”

“That’s what you said about Eggy, the murderous chicken.”

Jimmy cranes a look at Eggy, who is clucking spitefully at the hay in her coop. “She’ll be alright,” he says, with a kind of willful certainty. 

They’re quiet for a bit, watching night settle more firmly over the landscape. Finally, Jimmy says, “Everyone else gets to have a family, don’t they?”

Thomas looks over at him. “Yeah,” he says quietly. He touches Jimmy’s cheek. “Yes, love.”

+++

It’s a few nights later when Jimmy wakes up sweating. After a moment, he realizes Thomas is touching his shoulder and saying his name. “Sorry,” Jimmy grits out, in a voice hoarser than he expected. “Sorry,” he says again. He has no recollection of what he was dreaming about, or what he might have been screaming. There’s wetness on his cheeks, too. 

“S’alright,” Thomas says, still gently touching his shoulder. The rough edges of his scar feel strange, oddly soothing, against Jimmy’s bare skin. 

After a moment, Thomas takes his hand away. He switches the lamp on, then grabs the cigarettes off the bedside table and lights one, passing it to Jimmy. 

“Ta,” Jimmy says quietly, feeling stupid. His heart is still rabbiting in his chest. He sits up, one leg off the bed, toes touching the floor. His back is a little turned towards Thomas as he takes a long drag, trying to hide the way his hand is shaking. 

Thomas leans back against the headboard. “Not one all summer. Now, it’s every night seems like.”

Jimmy looks at him sharply. “Not every night.”

Thomas sighs. “I only wake you when you start crying.”

“Oh.”

“Jimmy,” Thomas starts, “Ever since --,” but Jimmy cuts him off.

“I won’t give up the market. I’m finally -,” he grimaces, his voice going a bit higher than he would like, “finally making a little money, contributing something here, feeling like a proper person again, and I don’t – I won’t give that up. So…,” he says, shooting for casual, missing it, and landing somewhere in the territory of fraught panic, “So sometimes the markets remind me a bit of being back in London, so what? I’m an Englishman, I’m just going to have to learn to deal with it. I’m fine, honestly.”

“Yes,” Thomas says, nodding at Jimmy’s posture, “I can see that, really fine, looking like you’re ready to do a runner in the middle of the night and all.”

“Thomas.”

Thomas looks back at him impassively. Suddenly the walls feel small and dark, and Jimmy remembers he was crying a few moments ago. He bites at his thumbnail, the hot end of his cigarette too close to his face.

“Come here,” Thomas says, pushing back the blankets against his hip, creating a space for Jimmy to occupy. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. He puts the cigarette out in the dish on his nightstand and crawls over to Thomas’ side. “Yeah,” he says again. Suddenly all he has to think about is Thomas’ easy, cradling command and Jimmy’s desire to do as he’s told. It feels like a gentling palm on the back of his neck. 

He presses his face against Thomas’ chest, shivering when Thomas’ hand does come up to stroke the skin on the back of his neck, the tender base of his skull. Underneath him, Thomas’ chest is bony and warm. “Alright,” Thomas says, soothingly. 

Jimmy touches his tongue to the lovely, good-smelling skin of Thomas’ chest, appreciates the tightening of Thomas’ fingers on his neck when he does it. 

He does it again, and again, until he notices Thomas’ prick starting to fatten up against his thigh. His mouth moves down towards Thomas’ navel. 

“Wait,” Thomas says, voice a little breathy. He pulls Jimmy up to face him, thumbs hooked under his chin. “M’not asking you to give up the market, alright?” His eyes are dark and serious. He rubs his thumb along Jimmy’s lip, which is distracting and grounding all at once. “Jus’ sayin’, you’ve got a choice. You’ve always got a choice now, alright?”

Jimmy nods. “I know,” he says, “I know,” but mostly he’s thinking about how he wants to be between the other man’s legs, wants his open mouth pressed to the base of Thomas’ cock, the heavy weight of Thomas’ cock in his throat as he looks up into Thomas’ eyes, which will be wet and cautiously awestruck and telling him he’s beloved again, drowning out all the other voices in Jimmy’s mind which would having him running, feral and wild, away from the only person who’s ever loved him. 

+++

A week later, Jimmy is boiling down the last of the wild berries into jam in the kitchen. His attention is half caught between checking on the quietly bubbling sauce and watching through the window as Ginger cautiously inspects the chicken coop, while Eggy, perched royally on the top of her home, pretends she has no idea Ginger is there and, frankly, has never seen a cow in her life. 

Thomas, on his half day, is bracketed at the kitchen table between a pile of their mending and a new time piece he’s repairing, this time from one of Anna’s friends whose grandfather’s pocket watch stopped working sometime around the turn of the century. As far as Jimmy can tell, he’s alternating between the two tasks, depending on the degree of his frustration (clock) and boredom (mending).

It’s his half day, and his braces are pushed down to his waist. He isn’t wearing any shoes. 

Jimmy keeps bringing him cups of tea. 

“Did you know,” Jimmy says, turning to lean against the counter, “that I love you?”

Thomas puts down the sewing, but other than that doesn’t move. “Oh?” His voice is casual. 

“Not sure I’ve ever said it,” Jimmy says quietly. There’s a bit of jam on his knuckle, dark red and sticky, like blood. 

“No,” Thomas says, “No, I don’t think so.”

Jimmy turns back to the stove top, pretends his heart isn’t quickening in his chest. “Well. Thought you should know.” 

+++

The days grow shorter, while the list of Jimmy’s responsibilities swells, so that, combined with Thomas’ long hours, they sometimes go whole stretches of time where the only moments they touch is by turning towards each other in sleep. 

They haven’t exchanged more than a few conscious words to each other in nearly a week when Jimmy wakes to the sound of Thomas starting to pull himself from bed. Something instinctive makes Jimmy wrap his arms around Thomas’ shoulders, anchoring him to the bed. “Don’t go,” he mumbles, mouth pressed against Thomas’ hairline. “Please.” He’s still half-asleep, so he can say it without blushing. 

Thomas kisses his knuckles, “I wish,” he rumbles. “Go back to sleep, love.”

Jimmy makes an unhappy noise, but he’s tired, and the bed is warm and smells like them, and Thomas’ voice is calm and sure. “Just quit Downton already,” he mumbles, before being dragged back down into sleep. 

So, it’s only with mild perplexity that Thomas, a few days later, looks up from the clock he’s repairing – a small, wooden one designed to complement a ship’s mantelpiece – and says, “Do you really think I should?”

Jimmy makes a small check mark in pencil on the ledger he’s started keeping for the market goods. “Sorry?”

They’re in the sitting room with the fire going, and Jimmy’s got his feet close enough to the grate that he feels profoundly warm. There’s a finger of whiskey next to him, and if anyone asked, he would deny that he’s positioned himself in exactly this spot so that he can watch the way Thomas’ hair falls over his forehead every time he leans in closer to inspect the clock on the little table in front of him. 

They haven’t fucked in a few days, but the room is quiet and warm, and Jimmy was only waiting for the wrinkle of concentration on Thomas’ brow to disappear, and then he was going to let Thomas watch him crawl across the room towards him on his knees. 

“Leave Downton,” Thomas says, looking back at the clock. He doesn’t make a move to start working on it, though. 

“Sorry?” Jimmy thinks he might have missed something, preoccupied with the reappearance of Thomas’ furrowed brow. 

“It’s what you said. The other day.” Thomas rolls his shoulders in a mute gesture of irritation. 

Jimmy puts his pencil down. “Alright, I’m listening.”

“You said I should just do it already,” Thomas says. He bites the inside of his mouth. “As if you’d been thinking about it for some time.”

“Well,” Jimmy says, shifting a little. “’Course I have. You’re gone half the time, aren’t you?”

Thomas hums a small noise of assent, but doesn’t say anything. 

Right, Jimmy thinks, and pulls himself off the floor so he can sit in Thomas’ lap, pushing the little table to the side with one careful foot. 

“Oh,” Thomas says, but his hands come up to settle on Jimmy’s hips. “Hello there.”

Jimmy kisses him once, chastely. “I thought maybe I could hear you better, if we were a bit closer.” He rolls his hips once for emphasis. 

Thomas grunts. “Not exactly doing wonders for my concentration, if I’m honest.”

Jimmy tucks a smirk into the side of his mouth. He can feel Thomas hardening against his bottom. Still. “Do you want to leave Downton?”

“I…,” Thomas says, with a deep sigh. He starts again. “It never occurred to me.”

Jimmy waits. 

“After you left,” Thomas says quietly, “I thought, well, this is it. And I got on with it. Mostly.”

Jimmy thinks of the neat scars on Thomas’ wrists, the mottle of flesh on his buttock. Jimmy’d thought they were war wounds the first few times he’d seen them, until one night he’d pressed his mouth against Thomas’ wrists and elicited a reaction he hadn’t expected. 

“Mostly,” Jimmy echoes. 

“Right. And then, it was just when they were kicking me out again that I realized I wanted to stay. It was the only place that had ever felt like what I imagined home was supposed to be.” He shifts, fingers tightening on Jimmy’s hips. “Now, of course, I can see that it was. A pale imitation.” 

Jimmy wants to kiss him again, but Thomas has more to say. “I – sometimes, I’ll be polishing the silver, or serving dinner for the millionth time,” he says quietly, “and I have this awful feeling like I might suffocate, like my heart might just stop dead right there in the dining room, and. Then it’s like. That’s it. Lord Grantham would ask the footmen to cart my body out, and there I’d go - out with the rest of the day’s refuse, and then, I dunno, Bates or someone else – anyone else – would take my place and they’d go back to their lamb chops and finger sandwiches.”

“If you weren’t at Downton,” Jimmy says thoughtfully, “where would you want to be?”

“Here,” Thomas says automatically. “I mean,” he clarifies, “I could help out with the gardening, and in the market stall with you. With two of us, we could produce more, sell more. It might be that much more profitable, the two of us, even without the wage from Downton. And, this clock repairing business is. It’s going pretty well, better than I – imagined it.” 

“You’ve thought about this.” 

“A bit,” Thomas admits, not meeting Jimmy’s eyes. 

“You planned this?”

“Possibly.”

“Just waiting for me to catch up?”

“No. No no no,” Thomas protests, shaking his head. 

“Goodness that’s a lot of no’s.”

Thomas cups Jimmy’s face. “I weren’t manipulating things, Jimmy. That’s all I’m saying. I only – when Anna asked me to fix that clock, and then she was so impressed, and paid me pretty well for it. I had a thought.” He hedges, “I didn’t want to overstep. With you.”

“You’re not. You couldn’t.” Jimmy tucks his thumbs under the collar of Thomas’ white shirt. “And I’m not angry.” Jimmy’s not sure what he’s feeling, so he settles on, “You might have told me what you were thinking.”

“’Cause you’d’ve done the same?” Thomas says skeptically. 

“Goodness, no,” Jimmy says, smirking, but Thomas’ eyes are so wide and careful, Jimmy thinks something might actually snap in the region of his heart. He leans in and drops a slow, smutty kiss on Thomas’ mouth. 

“I think it’s a brilliant idea,” he says, pulling away. 

“Alright,” Thomas says, always careful. 

“No more waking up without you.” Jimmy slides his fingers along the line of buttons on Thomas’ shirt. 

“It’d be an awful lot of work.”

“No more going to bed without you,” Jimmy continues, tilting his head to watch the blush that’s creeping up Thomas’ throat. He leans in and places his mouth there, and sure enough finds Thomas’ pulse thundering. 

“You might get sick of having me around so much,” Thomas says casually. 

Jimmy flutters his tongue against the pulse point. Beneath him, Thomas squirms. “No more waiting around all evening to put my mouth on you,” Jimmy continues blithely. He runs said mouth along the arch of Thomas’ throat, then admits, “Sometimes I want it so much, me mouth starts to water for it.”

“Jesus,” Thomas says. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy grunts. “Fuck, I want you.” His desire turns suddenly urgent, and touching Thomas through the material of his shirt is no longer enough. 

“We should,” Thomas grits out, hips jumping in answer to Jimmy’s seeking hands. “We should possibly have a plan.” 

“Yes,” Jimmy agrees. “Later, we will – later,” he breathes, the last word punctuated with a moan as Thomas picks him up by the thighs. “Oh, fuck, Thomas,” he says, hands scrabbling along the tense line of Thomas’ shoulders. 

They end up in bed, with Thomas draped over Jimmy’s back, his cock rubbing in long, teasing slides against Jimmy’s arse. The instinctive urge to arch his back, put his hips up for it, has Jimmy moaning in delirious, humiliated lust. 

Thomas kisses his shoulder blade. “I wanna do something,” he says. 

Jimmy rolls his forehead along the bed. “Alright,” he says, as if his thighs aren’t trembling with aching desire.

Thomas presses a kiss to the base of Jimmy’s spine, and then he’s dragging his mouth lower, and Jimmy is making a raw, terrible sound in the back of his throat. 

“Alright?” Thomas says, kissing the globe of Jimmy’s buttocks. 

Jimmy nods, not trusting himself to speak, something flayed turning over inside of him at the idea of Thomas putting his mouth there – of Thomas eating him out – like a girl. God.

“Good,” Thomas says, brushing his knuckles along Jimmy’s flank. He leans down again, and Jimmy’s nerves alight with pleasure. 

Thomas licks him until he’s slick with it, until he’s aching with the desire to be fucked and filled. He doesn’t realize he’s been begging for it, mouth half open and gasping against the shape of his fist, until Thomas says, “Easy, love, I’m getting there.”

Thomas presses two of his fingertips against Jimmy’s arse, kissing his lower back at the same time. “Look at me?”

Jimmy does, curving his neck around to look behind him. He does it without dislodging the way his shoulders are holding the brunt of his upper half. Thomas’ eyes are dark, a little unfocused, but he says, “You’re doing so well, darling.” 

Jimmy had learned quickly that some people got off on hurting him. The first time it’d happened, the man who was fucking him had come from the sharp, bitten off gasp Jimmy had made at the feeling of his head being tugged back too quickly. Most of his punters weren’t like that, but. Still. He’d never known anyone – until Thomas – who got off so completely on the idea of giving Jimmy pleasure. 

“Want you,” Jimmy says, rolling his hips backwards in simulation of a fuck, as Thomas jacks him with his other hand in between Jimmy’s legs. The position somehow seems filthier than anything and Jimmy whines, everything urgent and heady. “Please.”

“I know,” Thomas says. “Gonna give you my fingers first, okay?” When Jimmy nods, he presses forward, both fingers at once and up to the knuckle. Jimmy’s wet and open enough for it that it’s easy, not at all painful, and the thought makes him moan, loud and a little wanton. He parts his thighs, pushing back against the feeling of penetration. 

“I love doing this to you,” Thomas says softly. 

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah, love.” Thomas swivels his hand at the wrist and knees around so he can kiss Jimmy’s blush-red neck and fingerfuck him at the same time. “Wanna get you all loose and sloppy for me, that alright?”

Jimmy’s fingers are white knuckled on the coverlet. “God,” he breathes, moving back against Thomas’ hand, “you’re the only one I’d ever let talk to me like that, like I’m a girl or summat,” he says, lipping at Thomas’ jaw, mouth pink and puffy. 

Thomas starts to move his hand a little faster, and the sensation has Jimmy making these breathy, high little moans. “S’that it?” he slurs, feeling fucked out and dazed, “Want me on my knees, with me cunt in the air?”

Thomas breathes out through his nose, sharp and sudden. “Jimmy…”

Jimmy kisses away the rest of his words; it’s not a good kiss, too sloppy, too artless, too edged with something like pain. But neither of them pull away from it. 

Jimmy pants against Thomas’ mouth, “If you want me to be your girl, I will,” he says, though he hardly knows what he’s saying when he gets like this. He nudges Thomas over so he’s on his back and he can straddle his hips. Thomas has still got his fingers inside of him. 

“I’ll be a girl for you,” he says again, reaching back to grip Thomas’ cock, as if he’s going to sink down on it, take Thomas’ cock and his fingers at the same time. 

He rubs the head of Thomas’ cock against his hole, and though Thomas is looking at him as if he’s watching a startled animal, he moves his fingers out of the way enough that he can spread Jimmy’s hole for Jimmy to rub back against. 

“Oh, fuck, fuck,” Jimmy chants, “That feels good.”

Some of the tension bleeds out of Thomas’ face. “That’s my boy,” he says, and then he is pressing his cock inside, using his fingers to keep Jimmy open for him. 

The slide of his cock is as beautiful and easy as he’d promised, and Jimmy feels pleasure unlocking along his spine as Thomas fucks into him. When he’s seated, he grins down at Thomas with something like delirious pleasure. 

“Good boy,” Thomas says again, dragging his nails in light pressure along Jimmy’s sternum. His touch leaves red marks that fade quickly against Jimmy’s white skin. 

Jimmy arches his back, rolling his neck. This is what the word pleasure means, this moment, this feeling. 

They fuck slowly, now that some of the frenetic energy from earlier has been spent. Thomas hardly moves, except to touch Jimmy, and Jimmy’s entire sense of bodily consciousness has narrowed to the feeling of unhurriedly and beautifully riding Thomas’ cock. 

After they’ve come, a moment that feels less like a frantic release and more like the gentle, sloping way a candle falls apart and reshapes itself when lit, Thomas lays Jimmy out on his back and presses open-mouthed kisses against the points where bones meet skin most sharply – his ribs, the darts of his hip bones, the delicate arches of his ankles – until Jimmy is squirming with over-sensitized, drowsy pleasure. 

“C’mere,” he slurs, and Thomas presses a last, leisurely kiss against Jimmy’s shin before making his way to lie next to him. Their soft cocks brush against each other, but the pleasure is neither mounting nor urgent, simply present. 

“Sometimes my mouth runs away from me,” he admits, quietly. And then, because for him the two are inextricably linked, “You make me feel good.”

Thomas takes a moment to absorb that, but then the relationship between both confessions seems to clarify for him. He pulls Jimmy closer against him, kisses his temple, the curve of his strong jaw. 

Because Thomas is a good man, he seems to think an answering confession is the honorable thing to do, so he says, haltingly, “You make me feel like – as if I’m relearning, or perhaps learning for the first time, what goodness feels like.”

“Yes,” Jimmy says, pressing his face into the join of Thomas’ neck and shoulders. “That’s it exactly.”

+++

They agree that it makes sense for Thomas to finish out the year at Downton. They’ve never spent lavishly, but now they invest new vigor in the word frugal. They eat a lot of eggs, and what they don’t eat they sell at the market, along with the last of the year’s potatoes and bouquets of mums that Jimmy wraps in old newspapers. 

Jimmy still has nightmares, the kinds that leave him screaming and waking up with tears he doesn’t remember shedding. Thomas always holds him afterwards, and that’s enough, except when it isn’t, and then Jimmy paces the halls and waits for exhaustion to catch up with him. 

Sometimes, Jimmy finds Thomas looking at the ledger with worried eyes, and that’s when he slides it shut and reminds him that next year they’ll have two people working the garden, and they won’t be starting in the middle of June, scrambling to catch up all year. 

Halfway through October, when the leaves are curled with orange and brown, Jimmy’s drinking tea in the kitchen on a mid-morning break when he realizes Ginger hasn’t made one of her escapes in weeks. He looks out the window, as if he’s going to see her making a mad dash for the gate when his back is turned – but. She’s there, grazing politely on a small patch of grass next to the chicken coop. 

He brings her a cube of molasses sugar. “Hi, love.” She moos and lets him skritch her behind the ears. “Doing alright, are we?” 

He looks around the small garden, at the piles of half-raked leaves, the tree he and Thomas dared each other to climb in a fit of school boy competition once over the summer, the shed where Jimmy learned Thomas likes having his ears sucked on, the hedge Jimmy spent one colorful afternoon detangling Ginger from its branches. 

He runs his finger along her snout, and she shuts her eyes in pleasure. “Yeah,” he says, “we’re doing alright.”

+++

“Seeing how that’s the third time in as many days you’ve mentioned Daisy’s wedding,” Jimmy says, pausing to heft the woolen pullover he’s taken to wearing outside in the cold weather off his shoulders, “I take it,” he grunts, “that you want us to go together.” 

He lobs the dirty sweater towards the corner of the bedroom, ignoring Thomas’ despairing noise, and pours some of the water from the pitcher into the wash bowl. He’s been raking all morning again, and now he stinks of clean, cold sweat, which Jimmy hates but which has Thomas following him around with an air of extreme nonchalance. 

“You know,” Thomas says with the tone of someone who already knows he’s lost this particular battle, “we do have a bin for clothes that need washing.” 

“I’ll get it later,” Jimmy promises, moving past Thomas to grab the kettle from the kitchen. The water in the pitcher is icy cold. 

“Oh, I’m entirely reassured by that,” Thomas says darkly, crossing his arms and leaning against the threshold. The position affords him a view of Jimmy coming and going, incidentally. 

On his way back into the bedroom, kettle in hand, Jimmy drops a kiss on his pursed mouth. He smiles charmingly at him over his shoulder, which only deepens Thomas’ scowl, and adds the boiling water to the bowl. “So, Daisy’s wedding,” he prompts, at the same time that he pulls his sweaty undershirt off and balls it up. 

All told, Jimmy has a pretty good sense of what he looks like. For example, he knows that the past several months of daily physical labor have sculpted the muscles along his torso and arms, that the sun has darkened his skin a shade or two, that he’s mostly lost the starved look he arrived with back in March. 

“I. Yes,” Thomas says, watching with what looks like a moue of self-despair as Jimmy, glistening with sweat, pitches the dirty undershirt across the room to join the sweater. 

“You yes?” Jimmy wets the hand cloth nearby in the bowl and slashes a bit of water against his bare chest. 

“Um. Daisy’s wedding?”

“I think so,” Jimmy says, enjoying this. “You were saying?”

“Was I?”

“Seemed like you were,” Jimmy says. He wrings the towel out over his head. Beads of water sluice down his skin, over his throat and chest. He’s cooled down enough that his nipples are peaked and stiff. 

“Well, good,” Thomas says, pushing himself off the threshold with a little shake of his head and turning to go. “That’s settled then.”

“Glad we had this talk,” Jimmy calls after him.

“Immensely,” Thomas shouts back, out of sight. 

Jimmy turns back to the washing bowl now that he’s without an audience and starts to wash himself more efficiently. 

After a moment, Thomas reappears. “I realized,” he murmurs, “you must be exhausted, after the day you’ve had.” He takes the cloth from Jimmy’s hand. “Let me help you with that.”

Jimmy smiles, lets Thomas push him down on to the bed. “How charitable of you, Thomas,” he says, gasping a little when Thomas pushes his arm up over his head. 

“I know,” Thomas mutters, leaning in to press his face against Jimmy’s bared pit. “It’s truly my defining feature.” He licks a path from Jimmy’s arm pit down to his chest. “When will my self-sacrificing end?”

+++

“Right,” Thomas says, tucking his shirt back into his trousers. “Now that some of us have our wits about us,” he starts.

From the bed, Jimmy grunts. “Some of us have just had our wits sucked out through our cock.”

“What can I say, Jimmy, you are insatiable, darling. In the middle of the afternoon, I said? On a Wednesday, I said? What will the neighbors think, I said? But you were having none of it.”

“Oh, that’s how it went?”

“Something like that,” Thomas says vaguely. He grabs his cigarettes and lights one, taking a deep drag before passing it to Jimmy, who still hasn’t roused himself from his recumbent position on the bed. 

He puts one arm behind his head and looks at Thomas. “I take it we’re expected to attend Daisy’s wedding.”

Thomas gives a half nod. “It’s been…formally requested. By the bride. More than once.”

Jimmy bites at his thumb nail, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. “How much do the others know about us?”

Thomas plucks the cigarette back from him and takes a drag before he answers. Finally, he says, “As much as they want to. Or don’t want to, as it were.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“Everyone who was there when you were there. So – that’s Anna, Bates, Daisy, Molesley. They sort of. Figured it out on their own, you know, nothing said, only implied. Barely implied. We’re special friends, according to them. Who live together.” He snorts, then continues. “You’ve never met Andy or Phyllis but.” He scratches the back of his head. “Word gets around.”

“Christ.” Jimmy drops his head back on the bed and covers his face with his hands. 

“It’s not like I go around announcing it, inviting people to our wedding,” he says defensively. “Not all of us have the exhibitionist pleasure of doing that.”

“Yes,” Jimmy says, fear making his voice hard and clipped, “Because some of us can go jail for that, Thomas, that’s why.”

“I know that,” Thomas says tightly. Something flickers across his face, a memory perhaps, of the last time Jimmy and the threat of jail had loomed together in his mind. “Don’t I know that?”

Jimmy looks away. 

“Look,” Thomas says, sitting on the edge of the bed. “It’s not like before, alright? People are different. Different with me, I mean. Things are better. I trust that none of them would – would say or do anything to cause us harm.”

Jimmy shakes his head, even knowing how much it must take for Thomas to say that. “They don’t have to mean to cause harm to do just that,” he says, sitting up. He feels hunched in on himself. “One wrong word? A slip of the tongue? This gets out, or into the wrong hands, and it’s,” he says, throwing his hands up, “all this is finished. Fuckin’ finished, Thomas.”

Thomas looks at him, saying nothing. Then he gets up and moves to the wardrobe, pulls it open. “There.” 

On the wardrobe floor is a small suitcase. Jimmy had assumed it was empty. Now, Thomas pulls it out and lays it on the bed, flicking the latches open. Inside are neat rows of clothes, two pairs of shoes. Wedged in the corner, there’s a wad of money and a discrete pocket knife. 

“I’ve kept something like this since I were sixteen,” he explains. “For emergencies. Told myself, if ever I had to leave, no questions asked, at least I could do it quickly and with enough to get by for a couple of weeks, maybe more.” He clears his throat. “A week after you moved in, I – uh – doubled what had been in there. Just in case.”

Jimmy bites his lip. The shoes are flat and sensible, good for walking long distances. The clothes are mostly cotton and wool. Jimmy thinks he can see the bristles of a toothbrush underneath a pair of socks, and that, of all things, makes his eyes feel hot and itchy. He blinks, looking away. 

After a long silence, he says, “A week?”

Thomas smiles at him and closes the lid on the suitcase. “Alright,” he concedes softly, “night of.”

+++

On Thomas’ next half-day, they go into Ripon to get Jimmy a suit for the wedding. Some of the heaviness of the last few days dissipates under the yellow, winter sunshine, and every time Thomas’ hand bumps the back of his as they walk the dusty roads towards the train station, Jimmy has to swallow back a smile. 

The station is crowded because it’s a Saturday, which means the cars are full. The last time they’d taken the train to Ripon, it had been a Tuesday, and they’d had a car to themselves, and Thomas had kept one hand on Jimmy’s hip, low and hidden, the whole ride. 

Now, Thomas grabs a newspaper before they board and keeps his eyes trained on it, and Jimmy bites the inside of his mouth and looks out at the trees, blurring and reshaping, as the train passes by. 

When they debark in Ripon, Jimmy says quietly, “We could’ve passed for strangers, probably, to the other passengers.”

Thomas looks at him uncertainly. The station in Ripon is set off a little way from the village, and they’ve slowed their pace enough that they’re mostly on their own, the clusters of other people walking in pairs and small groups having peeled off as the path widened. 

Still, Jimmy lowers his voice. “Made me want to stand up and shout that I’d had your cock in my mouth already today, before even my first cup of tea, at that.”

Thomas’ eyes widen, his lips twitching in a surprised grin. “Goodness,” he says, “While I applaud your rebellious spirit, perhaps we should quell those impulses.” He pauses, then says in an undertone, “Not that I didn’t appreciate – tremendously – your method of asking me to get out of bed this morning.”

Jimmy looks away so Thomas doesn’t see the soppy smile that pulls from him. 

The tailor takes Jimmy’s measurements efficiently and without fanfare. His blonde hair is parted neatly and brassy with shiny pomade. Nearby, Thomas is looking with cultivated nonchalance at a display of men’s hats.

The tailor looks up at him from where he’s measuring his inseam. “Your friend tells me this is for a winter wedding, is that right, sir?” His voice is politely interested. 

Jimmy nods. 

“Excellent,” the tailor replies. “We have a number of heavy wool styles in stock for the winter that will be perfect for the occasion.”

“Not too heavy, I hope,” Jimmy says, already tugging at his collar. 

“No, sir,” the man says, a hint of a smile at the edge of his mouth. “Still quite breathable, I assure you. Tend to run warm, do you?”

“Something like that.” Jimmy watches as Thomas tries on an atrocious brown bowler. 

The man’s eyes flick between them and then he says, in a careful kind of voice, “My – um – business partner is the same way. Downright miserable for most of the summer. I tell him it’s lucky we live in England, where the summers only last six weeks at best.”

Jimmy looks down at the tailor, who looks back at him without saying anything. Jimmy had nearly forgotten the language of looking – how all it took was a particular glance in the street, or over the rim of a glass of whiskey. The way the eyes met and seemed to say, “I know you because you know me.”

He is saved from having to formulate an answer by Thomas walking over and joining them. Jimmy can’t help the sigh of relief he makes. “Find something you like?”

Thomas shrugs, “Not really.”

“Pity,” Jimmy lies. 

The tailor stands, snapping his measuring tape into a neat folded parcel. “Now, did you gentlemen have something in mind for the color and cut of the suit?”

Thomas blinks defensively at him. “It’s his suit.”

“Of course, sir.”

“I don’t make decisions for him.”

The tailor blinks back at Thomas. Jimmy considers hurling himself out the window. 

“Grey,” he blurts out a bit desperately, “I was thinking grey.”

“Wonderful,” the tailor says, and disappears into the back room with an air of extreme gratitude. 

Jimmy snorts. “No need to get fussy with him, Thomas.”

“I didn’t like what he was implying. Why should I tell you what to wear?”

“Dear god,” Jimmy says, stepping down from the measuring podium. “Who is Daisy marrying again? When I find him, I’m unfortunately going to have to kill him for what he’s put us through with all of this fuckery.”

Thomas hums his assent, locating Jimmy’s jacket and holding it out for him. “How dare they fall in love and be happy together.”

Jimmy lets Thomas help him into his jacket. “Rather selfish of them.”

The tailor brings them three different suit styles to choose from, which Jimmy does only with Thomas’ reluctant help, much to the satisfaction of the tailor. 

“The double-breasted style is certainly growing in fashion,” he says as he writes up their bill, “but personally I’m partial to your choice of the more traditional style worn after the war, designed to complement the neat waists and trim shapes of our young soldiers.” 

Jimmy doesn’t imagine the way his eyes travel over both of their figures. Thomas’ understanding of the situation appears to rewrite itself, and he thanks the tailor with a small smile as they’re leaving. 

“Cottoned on, did you?”

Thomas sniffs, “You could’ve told me.”

“Nah, I like to see you work for it a bit.”

They dine at a nearby pub for supper. Thomas orders them meat pies from the bar and returns with two mugs of foamy, dark ale. 

Jimmy takes a grateful sip. The pub’s quite crowded. Even with the twice-weekly days at the market, he’s mostly gotten used to the steady quiet of the cottage. 

“Alright?”

“Bit knackered,” Jimmy admits. 

Thomas nods. “We don’t have to stay,” he offers. 

Jimmy shrugs. “Might as well.” The train home doesn’t come for another hour. “No sense in waiting at the station.”

Still, they eat quietly and quickly, draining the last of their ales as they shrug into their coats and push out of the booth. 

Jimmy’s stifling a yawn as they walk out, not paying too much attention except for following the back of Thomas’ head through the crowded pub, so of course, that’s when it happens. 

It’s nothing so unsubtle as his name being called, though he’d never used his real name after the first time. Someone jostles into him, on purpose or accidentally or perhaps both, and Jimmy finds himself pitched against a man he vaguely recognizes in the way that he’s learned he’s the kind of man to avert his gaze from. Jimmy stumbles over his own feet, the man makes an ugly face and says something Jimmy can’t interpret, and then Thomas is pulling him through the crowd hard enough to hurt his arm. 

That’s all it is, barely a scuffle. Jimmy doesn’t understand why his heart is racing or why Thomas is looking at him like that. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles, because he doesn’t know what else to say. 

Thomas lets go of his arm quickly, straightening his jacket. “Keep walking,” he says. 

Once the village is a distant set of lights behind them, Thomas says, as if he’s choosing his words carefully, “Did you - know those men?”

“No,” Jimmy says truthfully. Then he amends, “I don’t think so.”

“You’re not sure?”

Jimmy shrugs. Thomas is looking at him incredulously. The lights of the station ahead obfuscate the rest of his expression. 

They keep walking. The sound of their shoes on the dirt path makes a grinding sound, clattering and dissonant in the otherwise quiet landscape. 

“When I were - ,” Jimmy says haltingly, after the silence has lengthened into something approaching interminable. He pauses though, unsure how to say what he means. Finally, he settles on, “It’s not like I memorized all their faces.”

“Well, they certainly remembered yours,” Thomas says, and that’s the last either of them say for a while. 

+++

“If you want to shout at me,” Jimmy says, hands in his pockets, “you can.”

Thomas smiles softly at him, and that’s even worse. “You never have,” Jimmy says, granting permission two-fold, something he’d never do with anyone else. 

Thomas looks down between his knees, at the patch of dusty dirt in front of the bench. They spent too many summer evenings smoking and drinking gin and coaxing Ginger closer with molasses sugar so they could skritch her nose from that bench that the grass in front of it died and never grew back properly. 

“I think I might be constitutionally incapable of doing so,” Thomas admits. 

“But you are angry,” Jimmy says, joining him on the bench. Their thighs don’t touch. “I wasn’t sure, I thought maybe – it was. Disgust, earlier,” he says, observationally, looking out at the dark garden, “or even disappointment. But you’ve had a cigarette in your hand since the station, so then I realized. Anger.”

He fusses with his hair for a minute as if his insides aren’t turning over on themselves. He nods at the latest cigarette sending curls of smoke above their heads and says, casually, “You’re going to make yourself sick, you know.”

Thomas doesn’t reply. 

Jimmy says, “Shall I -,” but Thomas interrupts. 

“I’m trying to decide,” he says, “who is most deserving of my anger.” He takes a drag off his cigarette, then says around the exhale, “There’s Lord Grantham, who forced you out of Downton. Or Carson, who never made you feel welcome in the first place. There’s Lady Anstruther, who abandoned a problem once it became inconvenient. Then there’s the more obvious choice of the men who bought your services and treated you badly for it, or the men who bought your services and treated you well enough that you learned affection and – and,” he stumbles a bit here, but says, “love was something to be exchanged in in in a financial transaction.”

His voice strains, but he continues in that terribly casual tone, “And then of course, there’s me, who was supposed to protect you and couldn’t. Didn’t.”

Jimmy touches his tongue to his bottom lip. “That’s a long list,” he says finally. 

“I have. A lot of anger.” He pauses. “Watching you get pushed around and called a catamite whore by a man twice your size has a way of doing that.”

Jimmy’s mouth twists. He wishes Thomas hadn’t even told him what the man had said. Even if they don’t want it to, now it lives with both of them, together and apart. He takes a breath. “I notice I don’t seem to make the list.”

Thomas looks at him quickly. “I don’t blame you.”

Jimmy’s reply is automatic. “Well maybe you should.” He stands up, hands on his waist, looking out into the dark line of the disappearing horizon. “Running in circles tryin’ to find someone else to blame when the obvious choice is standin’ right in front of you, no?”

“You’re not –.”

“Aren’t I, though?” He’s not sure what he’s saying, only that it feels like they’re putting in a lot of effort walking around a hole in the middle of the ground, and Jimmy’s not sure what would happen if either of them fell into it. A part of him suspects it’s not so much as a hole as a grave. 

He looks up at Thomas’ face, his red lips, the beautiful cut of his cheekbones. He thinks about all those times he caught Thomas looking at him, and wants to say, _how else could I have known if I hadn’t been looking first?_

Instead, he says, “Maybe what you’re really afraid of is if ye’ start yellin’ at me you won’t be able to stop.”

Thomas’ mouth makes a surprised, hurt shape, and Jimmy hates himself for it. He thinks Thomas will look away, maybe even walk back into the house without a reply, but he doesn’t. He rises from the bench, and swallowing down the shape of his frown, kisses Jimmy with both hands on his jaw. 

They end up fucking in the bedroom, with Jimmy in Thomas’ lap, Thomas’ mouth pressed in a hot circle against the scar that crosses the high span of Jimmy’s rib cage. Jimmy’s thighs are trembling from holding himself above Thomas, but mostly all he can think about is the way Thomas has his palm pressed against Jimmy’s chest, right over his heart. 

Afterwards, Jimmy says, “Not love. Never about love, with them.” He pauses, watching Thomas watch him. “You were the only one who ever had anything to teach me about that.”

+++

After that, time seems to reorganize around the wedding, which is set for the end of December. 

“Who does that,” Jimmy says in disgust when he finds out, “stealing the spotlight from baby Jesus? What kind of godless heathens…”

“Jimmy, have you even set foot in a church in the last ten years?”

“No, Thomas,” he says patiently, “but I am an abomination, and thus exempt from church foot-setting duties.”

Jimmy stops selling in the market, once they start running low enough on goods that it’d cost him more to get there and back than he’d hope to make in sales. He teaches himself how to bake bread and they eat a lot of toast on the days Thomas doesn’t bring home dinner from Downton.

Jimmy learns that Thomas likes to lick the taste of raspberry jam from the inside of his mouth, so Jimmy eats a lot of jam, too. 

Thomas claims the corner table in the sitting room for his clock commissions, and it soon becomes buried under a plethora of small tools and extra parts and half-finished projects. 

“Doesn’t it ever make you a bit sad,” Jimmy says one evening, as Thomas is bent over a rather ornate looking carriage clock. 

“Hmm?” Thomas doesn’t look up, but he tilts his ear towards Jimmy to show he’s listening. 

“You were the one who told me clocks are like living things.” Jimmy drops his hand to the back of Thomas’ neck and starts running his fingers through the ends of his close-cropped hair. “It makes me a bit sad, is all, to see them – like – gutted and broken.”

Thomas says nothing, but he puts his tools down and swivels towards Jimmy, letting him step into the space between his knees. Jimmy tries to laugh, “Bit spooky. Like a clock graveyard, and all.”

Thomas kisses his belly, still looking up at him. “You’re a good person,” he says, finally. 

Towards the middle of November, Jimmy has the worst spate of nightmares yet, and they leave him clumsy-footed and dead-eyed for days, afraid to sleep. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Thomas asks, passing him a cup of tea. 

“Infinitely not,” Jimmy says. He works in the garden from the first flicker of dawn until he can’t see his hands in front of him at night, and when that doesn’t prove successful, Thomas finds him running laps around the perimeter. 

“You don’t have to do that,” Jimmy pants, jogging in place in front of the bench where Thomas has wrapped himself in an old quilt and is reading by torch light. 

“I’m keeping Ginger company,” Thomas says, not looking up from his book.

Jimmy looks over to where Ginger is curled up in the corner of the chicken coop she’s claimed for herself, fast asleep. He thinks he can hear her snoring. 

“All this running around in the middle of the night,” Thomas continues, flipping a page of his book. “You’re scaring her.”

It goes on like that for three nights, until Jimmy realizes - with a surge of gratefulness - that he cannot physically take one more step. Thomas finds him like that, on his knees next to the beech tree in the front garden. “Are we done punishing ourselves?” His mouth is white and furious. He carries Jimmy inside, carefully removing his shoes and wrapping his bloody feet in bandages, and then he puts him to bed. 

Jimmy sleeps for sixteen hours, and he doesn’t dream once. 

+++

“Don’t watch me while I’m sleeping,” Jimmy says, without opening his eyes. 

“But it’s such a rare sight to behold, I feel I should glimpse it before I miss the chance again.”

Jimmy cracks one eye open. Thomas is sitting in a chair pulled in from the kitchen, his socked feet propped on the edge of the bed. There are purple shadows under his eyes, but they’re somehow forgettable compared to the furiously tight clench of his jaw. 

Jimmy wonders if he should roll over and feign going back to sleep. 

The sunlight, white and strong, streams in through the window, telling him it must be at least midday. He remembers waking up yesterday evening long enough for Thomas to force some soup and water down him, before crawling back into bed, where he apparently managed to sleep for another fourteen or so hours. 

“You’re not at work,” Jimmy says.

“I see your observational skills are still intact.” Thomas doesn’t look up from the book in his lap.

“Hmm,” Jimmy muses, licking his lips. “Whatever you’re reading must be making you really angry.”

Thomas snorts, pushing the book on his lap closed and finally looking over at Jimmy. He softens a little. “A proper horror story.”

Jimmy swallows. “Do the good guys win? Defeat the monsters?”

“Turns out it’s not that simple,” Thomas says, looking infinitely sorry. 

Jimmy looks away, up to the ceiling. “How disappointing.”

+++

“Did you make this yourself?” Jimmy hunches over the bowl in front of him, spooning another mouthful of stew up. 

Thomas drops into the seat next to him, pulling his cigarettes toward him. “Daisy sent it over.”

“Goddamnit,” Jimmy curses. 

Thomas raises an eyebrow as he lights a cigarette.

“It’s fucking delicious.”

Thomas nods in understanding. “The wedding becomes increasingly unavoidable. Can’t slight a woman who can cook like that.”

Jimmy grunts and takes another mouthful. Around an exhale of smoke, Thomas says, “Don’t make yourself sick.”

They sit together in silence for a moment, Thomas chain smoking, Jimmy eating quietly. It reminds him uncomfortably of the early days. He slides his foot forward under the table, until it rests atop Thomas’.

“How are you here, though? I mean there’s no such thing as days off at Downton.” He takes a sip of water. “Not unless you’re on the brink of death or something similarly catastrophic and irreversible.”

Thomas blinks at him, silent. 

Jimmy clears his throat. “Right.” He shifts uncomfortably until Thomas takes pity on him. 

“It’s good practice for Moseley, anyways,” he says, as if Jimmy’s emotional collapse couldn’t have come at a more convenient time. “A couple more weeks and he’ll be doing it on his own.”

Jimmy nods, then double takes the conversation. “You chose Moseley?” 

“He’s the most qualified.”

“Oh, Bates must love you.”

Thomas smirks. “We’ve shared such a special relationship during our time together. He’s pushed me against a wall in the middle of the night while wearing only our undershirts. I’ve rendered him speechless on more than one occasion.”

“Speechless with rage.”

“Don’t question our special bond, darling.”

Jimmy makes a gagging sound, “You’ve put me off my stew, thanks very much.”

On reflection, Jimmy considers that it’s perhaps a small payback for what Jimmy had put Thomas through.

+++

That night, Jimmy watches from bed as Thomas undresses. Thomas is always fastidious, but the care and time he devotes to putting his clothes away and washing his face tonight borders on pathological. 

Jimmy wants to make a joke, but he can’t think of anything funny. 

Finally, he just says, “Alright?”

Thomas shuts the wardrobe door, where he’d been fussing with his white shirt. He turns around and climbs into bed, laying on his side. 

Jimmy reaches out and touches the cuff of his sleep shirt. “Alright?” he says again. 

Thomas looks up from where he’d been watching Jimmy’s fingers against the fabric. Finally, he pulls Jimmy against him. It’s not until he’s got his face tucked into the curve of Jimmy’s neck, Jimmy’s arms around him, that he sighs, and says, “Alright.”

+++

 

By the following week, Jimmy feels mostly like himself again. He puts back on the weight he’d lost thanks to Daisy’s cooking, and the blisters and sores on his feet heal up quickly and without infection thanks to Thomas’ careful tending. He sleeps through the night a couple of times, and gets better at waking himself from nightmares before the screaming starts. He takes a lot of naps, and makes bargains with himself in the long hours of the night.

Thomas comes home late one night from work and finds Jimmy in the sitting room. “What are you doing in the dark, love?” His voice is quiet, but Jimmy jumps at the sound of it. 

“Oh,” he says, looking around. He shrugs. “Lost track of time.”

Thomas lights candles and turns on lamps until the cottage is suffused with soft warmth. They eat dinner quietly and afterwards Thomas adds a log to the fire in the sitting room and pulls Jimmy’s feet onto his lap on the couch. 

“May I?”

Jimmy sniffs, “Alright.”

Thomas tugs his socks off one at a time, then inspects each bony foot in turn. His touch is careful and somewhat clinical, but the soft pads of his fingers are sure and warm on Jimmy’s ankle, and his attention is entirely undivided. They haven’t fucked in a couple of weeks.

“Thomas?” Jimmy says, at the same time rubbing the heel of his unattended foot in a slow and careful slide between Thomas’ legs. 

Thomas stills, eyes gone dark and travelling the length of Jimmy’s body. When they reach his face, Jimmy smiles. “Hullo.” He parts his thighs, inviting. When Thomas hesitates, he realizes he’s waiting. 

Jimmy cocks his head. “What?”

“Are you sure?”

“If I want you to fuck me?” Jimmy says, to be clear. 

A line appears in the middle of Thomas’ forehead. He touches Jimmy’s knee. 

“Oh,” Jimmy says, feeling something hard clench in his chest. “If you want to fuck me.”

Thomas shakes his head, mouth tightening. His hands are gentle, though, as he tugs Jimmy’s socks back on over his feet. “No more bandages,” he says, eventually. 

“Wonderful,” Jimmy says. He pulls himself off the couch. 

“Where are you going?” 

“Nowhere,” he says, even as he’s walking towards the kitchen. Once there, he realizes he has no need of it, but he’s damned if he’s going to admit that by walking back out. 

He feels itchy under his skin, uncomfortable with his cock still hard in his trousers. He goes to the tap and runs cool water against his forehead. Then he stands there, with his hands gripping the edge of the sink, waiting for his heart to calm down. 

It doesn’t, but after a moment, he feels Thomas come up behind him. Warm lips brush the back of his neck, sending a shiver from the highest point of his spine to the arches of his feet. 

He presses his arse back against Thomas’ groin, and feels that Thomas is hard, too. Jimmy moans with something like relief, only distantly tinged with pleasure. “Want you,” Thomas breathes, “Of course I want you.”

Jimmy tugs Thomas’ hand between his legs and rolls his hips back. “Don’t stop,” he says, and what he means is _Don’t stop looking at me, or I might disappear._

He doesn’t say that though. 

Thomas’ mouth is hot on his neck. It sends shivers along Jimmy’s bones, his skin. There’s no light in the kitchen, only the sound of their bodies shifting against each other, the ghostly reflection of their forms, there and then not, in the dark window.

“Thomas,” Jimmy says, tilting his head back until he can kiss Thomas’ mouth. He feels the way Thomas’ fingers tighten around his hip at the plea in his voice, the needy way he’s baring his throat and arching his back. 

“Thomas,” he says, again, slurry against Thomas’ red mouth, “Want you.” He twists around and drops to his knees in one fluid movement, ends up with his whole face pressed between Thomas’ legs, mouthing and nosing along the hard shape of Thomas’ cock. 

“Have me,” Thomas says, gentling his hand along Jimmy’s scalp, along his jaw and chin. “You have me.” He exerts the lightest pressure to tilt Jimmy’s head back, and Jimmy moans at the soft command. 

He looks up, but is unwilling to remove his mouth from its o-shaped kiss against the wool of Thomas’ trouser front. “Want your cock in my mouth,” he mumbles.

He knows the picture he makes, sees it reflected in the dark flare of Thomas’ look. “I want to see you come first,” Thomas rumbles, and Jimmy whines with frustration and arousal – his mouth is wet and aching for the shape of Thomas’ cock. 

Thomas pulls him up off his knees and flicks his trousers open. “Wanna see you spill in my hand, love.”

Jimmy nods jerkily, suddenly wanting that, too. He gets his trousers down around his thighs, his shirt rucked up above his chest, as if baring all of the relevant parts of himself. 

Thomas touches him once, around the throat, then gentles his hand along Jimmy’s chest so he can hold him against him, back to front. Thomas has still got all of his clothes on; Jimmy’s naked from thigh to collar bones. 

“I can take it,” he gasps, when Thomas shifts as if to loosen his arm into a gentler hold. “Don’t let go.” Thomas kisses the side of his face until Jimmy quiets, then starts to touch him with one rough palm. 

As he moves his hand, he whispers in Jimmy’s ear about how sweet and good he is, how beautiful he looks with his cock out and leaking between his legs. 

“You don’t have to,” Jimmy says, thrusting his hips back to rub his arse against Thomas’ cock, “say those things.”

“I do,” Thomas says, and tells him he’s beautiful and beloved again. 

When Jimmy comes, he’s got his head thrown back against Thomas’ shoulder, the bones of his hands white and stark where they’re gripping the counter. 

“Messy boy,” Thomas breathes, a little hitching. He drags his palm through the come smeared along Jimmy’s belly. “Look at you,” he says, and Jimmy does the only thing he can think of – takes Thomas’ hand in his own and raises it to his mouth, runs his tongue along Thomas’ palm and fingers, sucking and licking. “Fuck,” Thomas says, watching him, eyes dark and intent. 

Jimmy pulls back, opens his mouth so Thomas can see the come pooled on his tongue, and something in Thomas’ face goes hazy and reverent. “Fuckin’ filthy,” he mutters, hefting Jimmy in his arms and propping him against the counter so that he can wrap his legs around Thomas’ waist. “My messy boy,” Thomas grunts again, mouth wrenched and wanting. 

In a distant part of his mind, Jimmy wonders what else he’d have to do, to make sure Thomas never stops looking at him like that. 

He moans as Thomas kisses the corner of his mouth. “Swallow,” Thomas says, fingers shaky against his jaw, hips grinding against the space between Jimmy’s open legs. “Let me see you swallow your come.”

There’s all racket in Jimmy’s brain, but he grabs Thomas’ palm and sets it against his throat. Thomas is panting against his temple, eyes screwed shut as he feels the undulation of Jimmy’s throat. 

Maybe it was too much to watch after all. Something desperate kicks up inside of Jimmy. “Give me yours,” he murmurs. His eyes feel hot. “Make me take it, please.”

“Is that what you want?” Thomas kisses the words into Jimmy’s temple. 

“Yes,” Jimmy says, even as he tightens his legs around Thomas’ waist. 

He remembers waking from hot dreams in the middle of the night, fist against his mouth in his servant’s cot, trembling with arousal and shame, images of Thomas putting him on his knees in the middle of the courtyard for everyone to see, pressing his face to the front of his pleated trousers, making him take the full length of his cock down his throat. He wants that now, wonders if he’ll ever stop wanting it like this, desperate and urgent and filthy. 

Thomas kisses him full on the mouth, then steps back a little so Jimmy can drop down from the counter and fold onto his knees in front of him. He places his cheek on Thomas’ thigh, waits. 

“Oh,” Thomas says, moving his hips so his cock brushes against Jimmy’s face. “Being good for it?”

Jimmy makes a sound in the back of his throat. He closes his eyes, hungry for it, and only opens them again when he feels Thomas’ fingers on his chin. “Open up for me, love,” he says, and Jimmy does, feels the disarming press of Thomas’ cock sliding between his lips. He moans when his nose is at the base of Thomas’ cock. 

He drags his hand down his chest –always a show - and starts pulling at his own prick, moaning at the feel of Thomas’ cock in his mouth, the way Thomas is touching his cheek to feel the shape of it inside him. 

“Please,” he says, pulling back, tongue still fluttering against Thomas’ shaft. “I -,” he can’t say it though, can’t even meet Thomas’ eyes as he o’s his mouth to suck him back in. 

He closes his eyes, moving his mouth shallowly over the head. He feels an odd burst of gratefulness in his chest when Thomas starts to fuck his mouth in earnest. 

“Alright, love,” he hears above him. “Alright.” Thomas’ hand returns to his jaw. His fingers are shaking. 

Jimmy’s got one fist pulling at his prick, the other curled loose and open on his knee, and he can’t stop the stifled, breathy moans he’s making every time he takes the full length of Thomas’ cock into his throat. It’s good, so good – Thomas’ thighs trembling above him, the gasping, wrenching noises he’s making as Jimmy flattens his tongue, sucking. 

He wants more.

He reaches up and tugs Thomas further in by the hip and holds him there. Then he lets go and crosses his wrists behind his back. He couldn’t be plainer if he was speaking aloud. 

“Jesus,” Thomas swears, “fucking hell.” He touches the back of Jimmy’s head, drawing a breathy noise from Jimmy that must encourage Thomas, because he increases the pressure of his touch, until Jimmy’s throat spasms. 

Thomas pulls back. “I’m hurting you,” he worries. 

Jimmy gulps for air, eyes watering. “Not, not hurting me.” He opens his mouth again, is surprised at the whine he makes when Thomas hesitates. “Please, Thomas,” he begs, “I want – I want you to show me,” he pauses, licking his lips, looking anywhere but Thomas’ uncomprehending face. “Show me how I’m yours,” he mutters finally. 

“Jimmy,” Thomas says, low and full of feeling, and Jimmy finally looks up at him. 

Jimmy wonders what he must look like; tear tracks on his cheeks, lips tender-pink and wet, eyes wide and glassy and begging for it. 

“Of course you’re mine,” Thomas says, as if there were ever any doubt. He touches the side of Jimmy’s face. “There was only ever you for me.”

Jimmy doesn’t say anything. Thomas’ thumb is playing with the edge of his mouth. 

“You need it, though, yeah,” Thomas says, more to himself than Jimmy, whose eyes are wide and blown. “You take it so well for me, is that it, love?”

Jimmy makes a sound at that, and rubs his cheek against Thomas’ cock. “Fuck my mouth,” he says, listing and open for it. “Please, let me show you - how good I can take it for you.”

When Thomas does, his hands on the crown of Jimmy’s head, thumbs at his temples, Jimmy’s vision whites out with pleasure. 

Jimmy remembers sitting in the pews on Sundays, stomach churning with sick, agonized longing for the moment when they would line up to take the body of Christ. He’d wait behind his mother and father and wouldn’t open his mouth until the priest commanded him to, and then – with his heart thundering in his ears – he’d touch his tongue to the sliver of skin on the priest’s finger as the papery wafer was laid there. 

He’d learned about worship, then, but he thinks this – with Thomas speaking in tongues above him, hands shaping a crown on his head – is like finding religion all over again. 

His eyes are watering, streaming down his cheeks, and every time Thomas pushes in too quickly or brutally, it makes the hair on the back of Jimmy’s neck stand up, makes him lean forward into the thrust of Thomas’ hips, grateful for it, the way it obliterates any other thought or instinct. 

Above the slick squelch of Thomas’ cock hitting the back of his throat, Jimmy can make out the sound of Thomas’ just-barely-stifled moaning, and it’s so much – when Thomas tells him to touch himself, his fist flies over his cock, the tightening spiral of a second orgasm starting in his belly. 

Thomas must be close too, because he bites out, “Gonna make a mess of you, sweetheart, you want that?” and Jimmy does, he does, and so he lets Thomas fuck the orgasm from him through his mouth, pleasure rippling through him at the feel and taste of a cock on his tongue, of Thomas’ fingertips on his skull. 

He comes for the second time that night; a full body reckoning that starts at the bottom of his feet and climbs up to his shaking shoulders. He spreads his knees as he comes, so Thomas can watch. 

“God,” Thomas gasps, fingers tightening against Jimmy’s scalp, “Oh, god,” he says, and then he’s coming as well, and Jimmy pulls back to feel it land along his cheek, his lips, his chin, moaning openly and a little brokenly.

Thomas makes a surprised sound but doesn’t move away. After a moment, he circles his cock with his fist and rubs the head along Jimmy’s mouth, through the smears of come on his cheek bone, giving Jimmy new meaning to the word marked. 

He hears Thomas curse above him when he angles his mouth to cover the head of his softening cock with his tongue, lipping at the hot skin, something animal inside of him wanting to cover himself in Thomas’ scent. He tries not to think about it too much. 

After a moment, Thomas moves for a damp cloth and then returns with it, dropping beside Jimmy, who is trembling and still panting. 

Thomas runs the cloth along his brow bone, his cheeks, his upper lip where he’s been painted with come. His eyes are wide and serious. “Alright?”

Jimmy opens his mouth but – doesn’t know what he would say. He wants to stop shaking. 

“Oh, Jimmy,” Thomas says, voice low and wrecked. He grips Jimmy’s jaw in both hands, kissing him softly and slowly. “Oh, my sweet, good boy,” he says, and the same thing that made Jimmy recoil when Thomas called him lovely that first time, and again when Thomas reached for him in the garden rears its head. He thinks suddenly that maybe he’ll never be rid of it, this thing that makes him hard and unloveable. 

He grips Thomas’ wrists and pulls his head away. Thomas kisses him once more, then backs off. 

Jimmy can’t stop shaking. 

The words come before he makes a decision to say them. “Now, you know…,” he says, throat making a punched-out sound. “You fuckin’ know.” 

Thomas looks at him. “Know what?” Thomas’ voice is soft and low, but Jimmy laughs – an ugly sound – and Thomas says even more earnestly, “What, darling?” 

“Look at me,” Jimmy breathes, the words coming easier now that he knows where this is going. “There’s something – something fuckin’ wrong with me.” 

“No –,” Thomas starts to say but Jimmy cuts him off. 

“I let other men fuck me,” he says, words clear and sharp in the quiet kitchen. “For money. And sometimes,” he says, ignoring the way his voice pitches, the way his eyes feel hot and achy. “Sometimes I liked it.” 

Thomas is quiet. Jimmy realizes he’ll have to make himself clearer. 

“I’m - not normal. S’not normal to like – to like that,” he says, still looking away, unable to look at Thomas’ kind face right now. “Weren’t enough for me to be a bender, had to make me – like this too,” Jimmy says. He wishes his voice didn’t sound so high and pinched. 

“It’s – nothing,” Thomas says, trying to get Jimmy to meet his eyes. He makes a soft sound. “Jimmy, darling, it’s -.”

Jimmy makes another wrenched sound and fists his hands in his hair. “S’not,” Jimmy says, ignoring the way Thomas flinches when he bangs his wrists against his forehead in frustration.

“I’m not right in the head.” He takes a wet breath. “Wanting it rough like that and me being all desperate for it. But I am, Thomas, I fucking am.”

The kitchen floor is cold underneath their bones. Jimmy tips his head back until he feels the cupboards behind him. He wants to apologize, say something to void the sick feeling that’s swirling in his stomach. 

Now that the moment is here, he suddenly feels not ready. He makes himself say it anyways. 

“When I were – when I first started. Renting - in London. There was a man. He used to pay me for the whole night, at a time, like. Had a big house in the city. Used to have parties – like – if you can call them that.” There’s a long pause, filled with Thomas’ tense waiting, Jimmy’s thunderous heart. “The first time, I was so nervous, so bloody nervous, he gave me a tincture. Laudanum, I think it were, like mums give their babies sometimes? You know?” He looks over to Thomas for confirmation of that, of all things. 

Thomas nods, knees pulled up to his chest, watching Jimmy unhappily. 

“Right, well. After a couple of drops of that stuff, well,” Jimmy makes a whistling sound. Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees Thomas’ fingers spasm on his knee. 

“Well,” Jimmy says, voice a little lighter now, “after that I weren’t so nervous. Didn’t much care about anything, really – which. Well, which they liked, o’ course. They thought it were a game, to see how many --,” he licks his lips, “how many I could take in a night.”

At that, Thomas reaches for him, but Jimmy shrugs away the touch, can’t bear it with what’s coming. “I learn’t to stop counting pretty quickly and they were always – always generous with the laudanum, so, I reckon I would’ve lost track, one way or another.” 

Thomas makes a guttural sound, like an animal caught in a trap. Jimmy breathes out through his nose. He’s come this far. He moves his head and looks at the ceiling. “I weren’t the only boy there,” he says. 

There’s a delicate splinter in the corner of the ceiling, Jimmy notes. 

“Sometimes,” his heart kicks up again, voice going shaky and high like before, “sometimes they wanted – wanted us to like do things for them. Make a show of it. With each other, like.” He can feel wetness on his cheeks, can feel his pulse in his neck rabbiting like a wild thing. “So, we would, an’ sometimes it was nice even, better than’ some old bugger breathin’ down your neck. But.” He stops. Takes a shuddery breath. “Some of the boys – they were too – they weren’t barely fightin’ age. Too – only they were so young, Thomas. An’ an’ an’ I did – once, nearly, but he was so little like,” he squeezes his eyes shut, voice trembling and high, “he was just a lad, and they’d given ‘im so much of that – that shit – he couldn’t even keep his eyes open, his little head kept tipping over onto me shoulder.” He’s weeping now, choked off sobs, his whole body wracked and jumping. 

Thomas makes a bitten off sound. “Oh, god.” 

“I didn’t,” Jimmy says through his tears, “I didn’t. Only I couldn’t do anything, ‘cept try and keep the others away from him. An’ I did – I did,” he says, wetness spilling freely along his cheeks, “I stayed with him, the whole night – figured out how to get the attention away from him, like?” 

He waits for Thomas’ nod, then sighs. “They thought it was funny – me pulling them off him and beggin’ for it instead. Thought I was a proper cock-whore. ‘Can’t get enough,’ they kept sayin’.” 

Jimmy exhales, realizes he’s coming to the end of his confession. He can hear the low moan of the wind in the trees. “I mean, they were right, weren’t they? You’d think – that would have like – put me off it all, for good, but.” He laughs humorlessly, feeling something sharp and hot give way in his chest. He presses his fists to his eyes, realizes he’s stopped crying. “It didn’t.”

Thomas’ silhouette is fragile and limned in grey light. Jimmy thinks he looks like a beautiful portrait, the kind you might find at a place like Downton. He makes himself look away. 

“So, now you know,” he says. “I’m banged up. No good.” He sighs, says it again, the words like a release. “No good at all.”

Finally, Jimmy pulls himself off the floor. His face feels hot. He wipes at it again, though he isn’t crying any longer. 

Thomas still hasn’t moved. Jimmy thinks to himself, _this is probably how it was always going to end for me, heart on the table and the stink of come still in the room._

He feels steadier now, though, that it’s happened, and his voice doesn’t shake at all when he says, “I’ll – uh – I’ll pack my things. Be gone in the morning.”

He means to go and sleep on the couch, but instead he finds himself heading towards the back door, called out into the black night, the moon soft and wavering overhead. It’s done, he thinks. God, it’s finally done. 

He drops down onto the bench and drags his foot across the wet earth. He feels hollow-chested, made of bird bones and ghostly air. 

After a few moments, he hears Thomas’ feet on the grass, wonders how he found the one person who seems intent on following him to the ends of the earth and then over the edge. 

Thomas kneels at his feet, kisses his palms. He looks up, but Jimmy still can’t meet his eyes. At last, Thomas says quietly, “You’ve been so brave.”

Jimmy bites his lip. “Don’t.”

Thomas continues, “So, so brave, my love.” He kisses the bowl-shaped openness of Jimmy’s palms again. “I hardly know how you’ve been able to stand it.”

Thomas’ touch is still warm from being indoors, and it raises the hair on Jimmy’s forearms. Everything else feels cold. 

Jimmy finally meets Thomas’ eyes, where he sees now that tears are welling in little, unspilled pools. Jimmy breathes out hard through his nose. “I’ll never forgive myself, Thomas.”

Thomas runs his lips over Jimmy’s knuckles. “Never is a long time,” he says, considering. 

“Not long enough.”

“Well,” Thomas says, “It’s a good thing I’m not going anywhere, then.”

Jimmy swallows, the dry click of his throat audible in the quiet garden. “And if I don’t want to be this way anymore?” He makes himself clarify. “Actin’ like your boy, takin’ it for you, likin’ it when you tell me what do?” It sounds more like a litany of what he wants, than what he wants to stop. 

Thomas’ face is carefully blank as he says, “I would understand, my love, and,” he pauses to move his lips to the tips of Jimmy’s fingers. “I would miss it terribly.”

“Oh.” Jimmy shifts on the bench. “I thought, maybe,” he says carefully, “you didn’t like it so much, were only puttin’ it on for me like.”

“I’m not that selfless, Jimmy,” Thomas says. 

“Yeah, you are,” Jimmy says, mouth twisting, “when it comes to me, you are.”

“Or good of an actor,” Thomas finishes. 

Jimmy’s mouth lifts in a half-smile, but it’s twisting down again before it even had a chance to become something real. “And if it means there’s something wrong with me? Something gone – gone foul inside of me?” 

“What I think,” Thomas says, rising from his knees to sit next to Jimmy on the bench, “is that how a man gets himself off ultimately has very little to do with anything else, including his character.” He hesitates, as if considering his next words. 

Jimmy presses. “Go on.” He has the sudden impression that Thomas has spent more time thinking on the topic than Jimmy has given him credit for. Possibly a great deal more. Maybe all the time they weren’t talking about it, Thomas was thinking about it. 

Thomas sighs, “Look, maybe they’ve got nothin’ to do with each other, what happened then and what you want now, but if they were to - maybe it’s,” he shrugs, “an appealing way to recreate those interactions. This time on your terms. With someone who loves you, who cares about you, someone - who’d hold you through it afterwards.” 

Jimmy shoves his hands into his pockets and sniffs, but Thomas only continues softly, “The way maybe you wished someone would’ve back then.”

Jimmy sniffs again, looking out into the dark garden. It’s mostly like peering into the mouth of a very long hall, or trying to make out the shape of your hand in the middle of the night. 

“Maybe,” he says, though he remembers the tenor of his desire for Thomas was always touched in some way by an impulse to bare his throat and his teeth at the same time. Mostly, it left him spinning in circles and seeking out odd ways to get Thomas around him. 

It occurs to him, for the first time, that maybe it doesn’t matter – whether he likes it rough now because he once was a whore, or whether he liked it rough always and that’s what made the idea of selling sex appealing, in its own way, before it stopped being appealing and started looking like a wash of constant grey, flecked with blood.

He doesn’t say that out loud. He remembers the way Thomas had looked the night the stranger in Ripon had called him a whore – like everything bright and good had been taken from the world, and Thomas had been called upon it to bear witness. 

He feels suddenly exhausted. He wants Thomas to touch him now, to put his palm on the back of Jimmy’s neck in the way that makes him feel beloved and belonging. It must show, because Thomas reaches over and does touch him, just the wing of his shoulder blade, and says, “Let’s go back inside, love.” 

Alright, Jimmy thinks. Maybe the hole he thought was a grave was - just a hole. _You can climb out of holes, with the right means,_ Jimmy thinks, taking Thomas’ hand as they head towards the light of their cottage. 

In their bedroom, Thomas undresses him, presses his lips to every inch of bared skin that his fingers brush, as if for the purpose of anointment, rather than pleasure. They lay down, facing each other. Thomas touches his face. “My brave, messy, beautiful boy,” he says, thumb on Jimmy’s bottom lip.

Jimmy angles his mouth, catches Thomas’ thumb inside it. Maybe not the end, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraph is from Lawrence Raab's Last Day on Earth.


	4. Chapter 4

Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape  
and the little churchyard with its lamenting names  
and the terrible reticent gorge in which the others  
end: again and again the two of us walk out together  
under the ancient trees, lay ourselves down again and again  
among the flowers, and look up into the sky.

Epilogue

Thomas finds him just as Mrs. Patmore is trying to foist a third piece of cake onto him with the admonishment that he’s too skinny. He, generously in his opinion, bites back a comment on failing eyesight, and is grateful Thomas was out of earshot for that remark. It’s only been the last couple of days that Thomas has stopped looking at his collarbones and hipbones with a mournful mix of desire and self-loathing.

“Daisy’s been asking for you, Mrs. Patmore,” Thomas says, passing her a glass of punch and guiding her in the vague direction of Daisy, who’s dressed in white and surrounded by a circle of cheerful guests across the church vestry. 

Patmore squints against the weak winter sunlight filtering through the stained-glass windows. The image is of Jesus on his knees before a circle of disciples. Jimmy’d done a double-take the first time he saw it, elbowing Thomas in the side and saying, “I know that one, I’ve done that one.” Thomas hadn’t found it funny.

Now, Patmore touches Thomas’ forearm with absent affection as she walks away. “’Course she is,” she says happily. 

Thomas tilts his head in Jimmy’s direction. “Surviving the reunion?”

“By the skin of me teeth,” Jimmy says, running a finger under his collar. “Is the boiler off in here or is it just me?” 

Thomas smiles at him, a touch too fondly. “That bad?”

“Well,” Jimmy says, taking a sip of his own punch, “in hindsight I maybe should have come just a touch more prepared with a response other than,” he swallows drily, feeling a little shrill, “than – than blinking like I’ve got something in me eye and shoving the nearest bit of cake in me mouth every time someone asks what I’ve been up to the past three years.” 

Thomas snorts, and Jimmy is heinously grateful that this is something they laugh about, sometimes. He feels his own lip curling into something like a smile. “Otherwise it’s been peachy – Mrs. Hughes about interviewed me as if I were up for a job again and Carson kept giving me looks like he was grateful I was no longer in his employ. Which certainly makes two of us.” 

Thomas makes a considering face. “Three of us. Perhaps me most of all.”

Jimmy looks around over the rim of his punch glass. It’s the first time since the reception started that he’s had a chance to do more than send Thomas pleading looks from across the hall, which Thomas had gamely ignored. 

He’s mostly stood his ground under the onslaught of former colleagues who remembered him with more affection than he’d expected, but there’s an itch of heat on all the places where his wool suit is touching bare skin – the circles of his wrists, the soft skin of his throat. The vestry is close and hot and loud, and he hasn’t been around so many bodies in – some time. 

Thomas misinterprets his fidgeting. His brows knit together minutely, though he doesn’t make any other movement. “Sore?”

Jimmy feels his heart kick up, remembering. He can’t help the smile lingering around the edges of his mouth. “A bit.” He swallows. “Just enough,” he says honestly. 

“Enough?”

“To still feel it,” Jimmy says, and enjoys the flash of heat in Thomas’ eyes as much as he’d enjoyed the whisper of silk around his wrists last night. 

“Ah,” Thomas says, with something that sounds like restraint. 

Jimmy smirks. “Anyways, you were saying?” He reaches into his pocket for his pack of cigarettes, though he thinks there’s probably a rule about smoking on church grounds somewhere. “About how pleased you were I’d been cruelly dismissed and left to fend for myself on the streets?”

Thomas plucks the cigarette from Jimmy’s lips before he can light it. Sometimes Jimmy forgets Thomas grew up proper Catholic, still keeps a rosary in the bedside table that he thinks Jimmy knows nothing about. There’s the line on his forehead that always appears when Jimmy talks about his past as if it were happening to someone else, but he softens after a moment, still looking at Jimmy with banked heat. 

Jimmy is glad they’re in a quiet corner of the vestry. 

“Well,” Thomas says lightly, though he’s lowered his voice in a way that makes all of the hair on Jimmy’s neck stand up. “If you were still under the employment of Lord Grantham, I might not be able to tell you that when we get home tonight,” he says, shifting so that he’s facing only Jimmy, so that no one else could read the shape of his words on his mouth, “I want you to remove your shoes and your jacket and then kneel on the bed. Chest down,” his words become clipped but his eyes remain soft and warm. “Those lovely hips arched up.” He looks over Jimmy’s shoulder, leaning in as if he’s looking out the window. Jimmy swallows. “Hands behind your back.”

Jimmy looks at Thomas, then away. “I could undress for you, first, if you like.” He can see the flutter of Thomas’ lashes at his words. “Make myself ready for you.” He’s nearly whispering.

Thomas smiles, the one he reserves for Jimmy. “Not tonight,” he says, with something like reverence. “I’ll take the pleasure of undressing you tonight.” His eyes flicker up to the image of Jesus, beloved and kneeling before his disciples. Jimmy feels a low, dark pulse of familiar desire at the base of his spine. 

He breathes out through his nose. The chatter of the wedding party comes back to him as if he’s surfacing out of a dream. He commits himself to taking a step back from Thomas. 

“Probably wise,” he says, at last, affecting nonchalance. “I do think they frown on that sort of thing at Downton.”

They’re interrupted by a sudden burst of laughter from across the hall. It’s bright and cheerful and ringing, and it makes Jimmy flinch, brutal and quick, like a wire pulled tight. 

Thomas is looking at him. “Shall we go outside for a smoke?” 

They weave through the crowd, Jimmy with his head down, Thomas murmuring greetings and making vague gestures towards his pack of cigarettes. The hallway outside the vestry is quiet. Jimmy can see grey, wintry sky through the heavy front doors, half propped open. 

He stops at the doorway. They’re about to walk over the church’s threshold together, two men in their best suits, shoulders touching. The wedding bells overhead were rung not an hour ago. 

“Jimmy?” Thomas is looking for him over his shoulder. 

Jimmy nods. “Right here,” he says, reaching forward for the cigarette Thomas passes him. “I’m right here.”

+++

and all the mornings that were not given to me  
that are now given to me, for no reason I understand,  
and the light that falls over us in sheets of slow  
quiet—uncountable, undreamed, even in the lesser  
minutes of my life, which I now would  
keep, and hold close, if only for you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraph is Rainer Maria Rilke's Again and again, even though we know love's landscape, translated by Edward Snow. 
> 
> Title comes from Joanna Klink's Noctilucent, quoted there at the end, and which always makes me think of Thomas and Jimmy. 
> 
> +++
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! Feedback, comments, and con-crit all welcome and adored. This story is my love letter to Jimmy Kent, to all of the Thommy fandom that keep these two alive and breathing and loving each other, and to my self for finally starting to learn that there isn't a single, correct way to write about trauma. <3


End file.
